Building an In Plain Sight Solution - Hiding Stuff

[MacWa77ace]

I cut the motherboard to extract the plug section. Used my trusty dremel clone from harbor freight.



Needed to get those two bolt holes in the cut so it will attach to the chassis via the same bolts that hold the entire motherboard.



These are the blank holes that this 'piece will fill'.





And the final look:

[MacWa77ace]

I had to drill out a bunch of rivets to remove the interior framework that holds the CD and hard drives. Some of the rivets also held the exterior 'skin' of the box onto the chassis. It was easy and fast with my electric drill.

But some of the rivets were in the wrong direction and some where not in a position where they could be drilled. I saw these initially and thought i might have to grind them off, but I just used a large mallet and a large flathead screwdriver and just 'banged' them out. Doing it that way was fast and easy.

SOME of the rivets that were removed, held both the interior framework and the 'decorative skin' onto the chassis. These need to be replaced to hold the skin on. Initially I put a metal screw into the hole, but as you can see in the photo, not a great solution. I have a cold rivet gun so I'm just going to re-rivet where needed. It's not a lot of places.

In this photo you seen the cold rivet on the left and the screw on the right. I had these plastic connectors also but the cold rivets will be best.



Then I had to fasten the sides of the power supply down. so I just drove some self tapping metal screws into it. That worked pretty good, had to use a starter punch and my drill driver for those two screws.



The final interior space is pretty large.

[MacWa77ace]

I'm thinking this took a little less than an hour total. Including taking photos.