Project "Acrylonia"

Written by Stuyo

Wednesday, 18 October 2006

 

Part 4 - The Box

This is the box. The only things cut with laser are its walls. They are made of 4 mm clear acrylic. Everything else is made by hand.

This box was ready before the summer of �05. It was planned to hold a much smaller PSU and a motherboard with dimensions 240x200 mm. The computer inside would have been Celeron 533 and the 90W PSU was enough to power it. But with the new motherboard, this would have been less than adequate and I also wanted to be able to overclock. Moreover the new motherboard had a 12V P4 PSU connector. These were the reasons to use the FPS PSU.

On the whole the would have been plenty space in the box. But with the new motherboard and PSU there wasn�t much left. The inside dimensions of the box were 120x250x400 mm. And the motherboard is 240x240 mm, the PSU is 125 mm high. That way on the vertical I had about 40 mm free and on the horizontal � only 1! When the project advanced, this proved to be a great nuisance and greatly complicated the building of the front panel as well as the PSU mod. Not to mention the difficulties involved in deciding how to place the PSU in the case � it has vents on 3 of its 6 sides.

Lets begin with some pictures:

These are the box�s corners, they will hold the side panels. The mounting holes are threaded, so no nuts are used.

The front panels are mounted with 5 bolts, the rear � with 3. The square planks are sanded, they were yellow at first. Every corner is mounted with 3 self retaining bolts on one side and 2 on the other. The plastic washers are from and old child construction set. On the whole the pictures speak for themselves.

Accidentally the box fell on one side and got cracked. I didn�t managed to get another acrylic panel�

The word �Acrylon� on the protective foil was on the front of the case. That�s where the idea for the name came.

Up till now I used around 40 bolts M5 and 40 self retaining bolts.