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What was your first case mod?

W

WiLLiSTER

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 24, 2008
Messages
2,702
I'm thinking about trying my hand at modding a case I got and started to wonder where other people started. What were your first mods and in retrospect were they a good choice?
 
I knocked out the hard drive bay with a chisel and hammer and then suspended my drives with mini bungee cords.


worked great.
 
Kinda small, but i made holes in my mobo tray for better cable managment. And like the guy above, i suspended my hard drives with heavy rubber bands.
 
i dove right in, got a dremel, made some blowholes, painted the chassis etc. Just plan what you're going to do, get the right tools, and take your time
 
I painted the inside of my Raidmax/Cheiftec Dragon-alike black, with all the blue plastic clips gold.

Then I tried sleeving a PSU, flipped the red and yellow wires, and killed 2 hard drives and a dvd burner.
 
Took one of my old aluminum 5 1/4" covers, drilled a hole, put in a car cigarette lighter (with the green ring around it) and wired it to the psu.

Bad idea because my buddy mark liked the idea, copied it using a plastic cover, and killed his PC and carpet with fire.
 
You're lucky you didn't end up on fire yourself. Those things are typically rated at 15-20 amps, which would require much thicker wire than stock power supply stuff...
 
i tried to cut out a side hole on my antec soho case and it was steel, steel vs saw the steel case 1 me 0 :(
 
LesterOfPuppets2 said:
You're lucky you didn't end up on fire yourself. Those things are typically rated at 15-20 amps, which would require much thicker wire than stock power supply stuff...
Click to expand...


I had a 7.5amp Buss inline fuse on it, just in case. I didn't even know if i needed it, just did it.
 
My first was twin 80mm intakes mounted in a couple 5.25" bays, along with an easily removed 80 tpi mesh filter.
73546049_4482fec138.jpg


The filter frame (two cut-out plastic bay covers) warped a little on the bottom, so not very pretty, but VERY effective.
73546048_6edbf9a60f.jpg
 
My first case mod was to convert an Aspire X-Qpack micro-ATX case to use normal ATX motherboards, which it only barely had enough surface room to even do. It came out great though, and cooled beautifully :D.
 
My first case mod was cutting a window into my side panel with a dremel followed by cutting out hard drive cages to make room for a radiator for the WC setup.
 
That's a really nice end result lester. Do you remember where you got the mesh from?
 
It's screenprinting mesh which I salvaged from a ripped screen at work. 80 tpi (threads per inch) is a little fine for the application, I kinda wish we had had a ripped 60 tpi around at the time (fine enough to keep the cat hair out, but let plenty of air in.

Those fans sure helped cool the olde Athlon XP 2200+.
 
Well, I tried making a window in my old emachine..which turned out miserable.. I was 13 at the time, and no income, and no power tools.. So i was just hacking away with whatever tool I saw fit...

Then I started drilling random holes in the side panel..

then I said to my self, "Bare, rigid metal. Seems safe." So I took of the side panel. Of course before I did that I carved "Type R" on the side of it for the blazing fast speed of the Emachine. It was painted in the spray paint that changes colours from green to purple.
 
I wired up a On/Off switch for my cold cathode lights and mounted it on the front of the case, when I turned it on, my computer made a whining noise and smoke came out of it. Burnt a hole right through my brand new 6800GT, lucky EVGA replaced it.
 
Cutting a 92mm blowhole in the top of my case, spraying the insides of it with some of that sound-deadening stuff from the underside of cars, and cutting out the front and back to make room for 120's. In '97 :)
 
On my gateway case, took out the hard drive bay (luckily it was screwed on) and mounted my hard drive flush with the motherboard tray where the hard drive bay used to be, so I could get better airflow in and out of the case. Now I was improving airflow in a p3 800 coppermine with an all aluminum passive heatsink (all it needed), I could not overclock it, I could not even read the temps of the processor, and I removed the hard drive cage to improve air flow.

The case came with zero fans, only the one in the psu, and that one was in perma 5v mode, and I added a 120 in back and 80 in front.

The first mod to involve a dremel had to be when I cut out the air vents because they were too restrictive on this aspire x dreamer case.
 
Drilling out the pinholes on an Enlight 7237 case so the front 80mm fan could actually suck air through there. I think this was in 1999...

Here is what the cases looks like stock, those 32 tiny holes were all that fed a 80mm fn...:

en_front.jpg
 
Cutting out a side panel in a case for a window and painting it...working on it still, haven't had time to finish!
 
LesterOfPuppets2 said:
I did a similar "mod". I didn't move the exhaust, however just added one by wedging a fan in between firewire jacks and some foam...only really needed it in the summertime.
192192526_91e3d5df9a.jpg
Click to expand...

Thats pretty nifty.

I didnt post this before because i didnt really think of it as a case mod, but since you put that up there i might aswell put this up.

4 pieces of plexi dremeled out to make a sort of slot cooler except located in the floppy bay.
DSCF0205.jpg

(Ive since sanded it down and made it all smooth)
 
My first mod was a switch for my blue cold cathodes, changed out the orange LEDs to blue in my old DigiDoc5 (I miss that thing :( ), and added side and top fans to my Antec 1040 case. The case already had a window. I also changed out the power and HD LEDs to blue. This was my first modded build, all my other builds were in beige boxes. I'll dig up some pics later. I also managed to change out the red LED in my MX500 to blue.
 
ocellaris said:
Drilling out the pinholes on an Enlight 7237 case so the front 80mm fan could actually suck air through there. I think this was in 1999...

Here is what the cases looks like stock, those 32 tiny holes were all that fed a 80mm fn...:

en_front.jpg
Click to expand...

I remember those cases. They were pretty nice for the time. I built so many systems with those for customers, lol.
 
I had a media server back in the 90s with a dead CD drive gutted and a 120mm fan mounted to the front, and 4 HDs mounted sideways...

Was a BP6 mobo with dual celeron 366s running at 550MHz. I still have the board in my closet, it's not really worth running anymore but I've kept it for nostalgia purposes. I had the side panel off and a 120mm fan zapped to the case's crossbar to keep the cpus cool... They'd error out and bluescreen if they went over 36C. lol

At the time it made a nice counterstrike server... and someone could play locally on it without lagging the server out.
 
my first major mod was a total failure. i had just switched the contents of my 1.5ghz p4 gateway computer to a new aluminum case which went fine, and i had this leftover gateway case and decided to chop it...literally chop it in half to make it slimmer. i actually wanted to make it into an htpc and needed the case to fit between shelves on my entertainment center. i think my clearance was something like 6".

so i took this perfectly good atx tower style case and placed it on its side like a htpc, then i proceeded to dremel about 3- inches off of it all the way around. i guess i figured i would be able to fabricate something to hold the side panel (now top) on, but it was hopeless. i basically destroyed a perfectly good case on a whim. i had no real plan going in, not enough tools or workspace to pull it off. i ended up buying an antec overture for my htpc needs, but i did learn a ton about what NOT to do.

btw, my first successful mod involved turning the intake/exhaust ports from 80mm to 120mm on a kingwin kt-404 tri-window case.
 
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