And they said I was crazy

They were right

The motherboard is a cheap one, with crappy onboard sound and shared video and a Celeron 333A. I've added a hard drive, more RAM, two NICs, and a Voodoo3 2000. Still, the case it shipped in was gawd-awful, bad enough that I had to take tinsnips to the back of it so that my new cards would fit.

The idea for the woodcase has been bouncing around in my head for a while now. Lots of spare scrap wood around the house, lots of fun power tools to play with too. So finally, one weekend when no family members were home to force me to think about it, I dismantled the computer and began work on the woodcase. Sadly, my Quickcam is hooked up to that box so I couldn't take many in progress QuickPics.

Basically, I made it up as I went along. Mounting the motherboard to some think plywood went quite well, but securing the drives in the case with only wood and screws didn't.


Two pictures of a partially-completed woodcase. Power supply is nicely hanging out and the drives were pretty much just secured with "lucky guess" screwholes and by making the frame rather tight.


Here we have the woodcase, after I more or less stopped working on it for a while. The big problems here are that I hadn't come up with a good way to hold the drives, yet, and there's no cover. The power supply is on the "floor" because that ended up being the easiest place to mount it.


And this is the final version, so to speak. First we have the case with the "lid down" and then with the side flipped up to reveal the contents. The nicest thing about the case is that the side is just on hinges and is held down with two hooks, it opens in just a second. I went away from the pure wooden case, because I couldn't fabricate a good drive holder, so there is metal there, out of an old case. The case has a very solid feel to it, and actually isn't overly heavy. 2x4s in the front and back serve as nice handles. The only real annoying things are when swapping cards and drives, as both involve a bit of awkwardness. Note the PC speaker attached to the side of the power supply. Yes, if you look at the timestamps there, you'll see I worked on that late enough into the night on Christmas Eve that the pics were actually taken on Christmas morning.

Here are a bunch of pics I scanned well after the fact...

And here's me...apparently checking out what all the hype about wearable computers is.

Thanks to Tom for some help in the earlier stages of construction.
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By Dylan Flipse,