Mod Journal: SaBs' farie box
My wife Sabriena has put up with shit computers for as long as I've known her. Christmas was coming up, and I really wanted to give her a machine she could be proud to use - and of course any excuse to mod something is a good excuse.
I was given a case to start with by a good friend of mine. It came with a PSU and everything, but the board had literally caught fire inside it and was toast. I took the case anyway, figuring I could do something with it. I didn't realise at the time (nor until after I'd already put too much work into it) that it was a Micro-ATX case and would only fit a mATX board. Uh oh.
So anyway, I started out by giving the thing a healthy dose of elbow-grease inspired ass-kicking with some sandpaper. Your finish is only going to be as smooth as what you start with, and while I'm generally an impatient person I put as much time as I could stand into this section of it. Finally after about two hours I was ready to give it some shots of color.
The color I'd chosen for her? Blueberry! It was close enough to purple but didn't look overly yucky. I painted the front bezel, the front of the CD-ROM, and all the sides of the case over the course of two nights, giving it multiple thin coats and ever so light sandings in between every so often.
I finally started putting the machine together with a board I'd managed to horse-trade for, but I wanted something extra. We'd pretty well decided that using the machine in it's flat configuration would leave the monitor too high, and since the CD-ROM would work in a vertical position we ended up with a Micro-ATX micro-minitower case.
So I was browsing around the Neopets website when I came across a page called How to draw an Earth Faerie. I quickly printed out one of the uncolored line-art versions of it, and blew it up. I traced really hard on the still-not-100%-cured paint, and it left a faint outline on the side of the box.
I sat and hand painted the damn thing over the course of two nights. It was perhaps my most artistic moment.
Some weeks later, I finally tore apart SaBs' monitor and gave it the blueberry treatement. The speakers were a challenge, because the accoustic engineers at Altec Lansing felt the need to secure the things together with hot-glue. Finally, I got the thing all apart, painted, and put back together. For good measure, and so as not to deaden their accoustic abilities, I dyed the speaker grilles slate blue with Duplicolor vinyl dye.
What I would really like to try sometime soon with speaker grilles is dying them in kool-aid, or some form of lighter liquid fabric dye. While the difference isn't audible, it did leave the grilles slightly stiffer than they were previously.
So anyway, I got the thing all put back toghether and basically complete, except for some possible cooling modifications I'll be making to it sometime this summer. There you have it, Sabriena's faerie box!
Figure #1
Figure #2