I used to be somewhat of a casemodder in the early to mid 2000s. That's kind of the style of casemodding that I still like today. We used to shun people who buy ready parts or cases instead of
building parts and modding cases themselves. I especially was an advocat of building things from materials that could be found on the street or in scrap containers or were otherwise free to aquire. Maybe
just because i didn't have any money, didn't know many people who had enough money to simply buy materials and tools and didn't foresee a future where I was able to simply buy anything I needed to build
something. To this day I like using leftovers, scrap and otherwise free materials to build things. I think I wasn't aware of that in the 2000s; but which case mods I like how much is to a large degree
determined by how scrappy the building materials were and how simple the tools were. I wasn't usually trying to build something that looks slick and exactly like planned, but something that looks unique
and cool, and maybe extraordinary.
Here are a few examples of things that I did to cases of mine that I liked.
(Pictures are attached without any comments for now.)
Coloured foil window
Making a whole in the left wall of a tower case is probably the most common case mod. There were various window kits to make it easy to get to a clean-looking
result. I didn't care for those for a long time. Instead of bying any material to create a window in my case, I used what I had: a dremel-like tool with a cutting disk and some red polymere foil an old
text book used to be covered with. If I remember correctly, my mother bought this book used one year for my new school year instead of getting the current version. The previous owner had a red protectie
cover around it. Eventually one of the seams ripped and the cover slid off every day. So I left the cover off. It was translucent. A unique material, I thought. So I kkept it in case I wanted to build
something with it some day. The case I used it for used to house a generic 286. I put a 586 in it, I think. In the early 2000s that was just an old, very slow computer, not a #RetroComputing statement. I
glued the sheet to the steel case from the inside after removing the burr and abraded the edges with a used corner of some sand paper. With bright cold lights inside you could sort of look inside the
case. But it was mainly for style. The rest of the case was covered in some tape that I found at some building site once. That way the cut edges didn't look too rough. It certainly was a unique look. I
still like the style of that case.
Plastic hose IDE and floppy cables
Ribbon cables, such as they were used for IDE, floppy drives and SCSI, used to be impossible to tuck away nicely. Round cables, such as pretty much
all cables that are connected externally, can be clipped almost anywere. Wide ribbon cables need to be folded to wire them cleanly. That doesn't even work well if the case and all parts are designed for
it, which they never are. In most PCs those cables used to be just left hanging around, blocking airflow and view. Some PC manufacturers used to cut the ribbons into five or six parts and fixed them with
a stacked position with cable ties. That looked much cleaner. And suddenly round IDE and floppy cables became a thing. The connectors were the same. But inbetween they weren't ribbon cables anymore
because the individual wires were split up and shrouded in a plastic tube. Those cables were more flexible and usually more colourful than conventional IDE cables. Again, you could buy them. But until
the day I got a set with a motherboard that I bought, I didn't want "factory made" round IDE and floppy cables. I made my own by splitting up ribbon cables and stuffing them through an old shower hose or
a piece of a garden hose. Not as flexible, but just as practical as bought ones.
Aluminium tape wrap
I don't know where I got it. But I had enough wide aluminium tape to cover an entire mini tower on the sides and the top. To cover up the imperfect edges I used red
electric tape. So almost the entire case was striped red and silver at an unusual. Simple, no cost for me in that case, and quickly giving a nice, retrofuturistic look to a before boring, grey mini
tower.
IC exterior
Another idea that I once had was to use all the ICs (at least those that were at least 1 cm wide) from all those defective motherboards and extension cards that accumulated
over the years. People would bring and I would pick up so much old PC hardware that others didn't need anymore. Often the reason was that at least some part had a hardware defect, in which case I usually
gave up my hopes to get it working again. I had an entire wall covered in old motherboards at one point. Much of this stuff was from the mid-90s or older and therefore not worth keeping intact even if it
was in a great condition when I got it. Eventually there were just too many unused and defective cards and other boards and I decided to recycle their ICs before I got rid of what I thought I'd never
want to even look at again. I cut off all those ICs with a knife (only SMD chips), covered the right side of a big tower in double-sided adhesive tape and neatly placed one next to another. Sometimes I
used chips smaller than a cm to fill gaps. Not even half of the side got covered. I tried to get more from other people who wanted to throw stuff away. But what I got didn't bring me close to covering
even the one side. My idea was to cover all the sides. I realised I had to pay money to get enough even broken electronics to finish the case. That wasn't beside the idea. Also it didn't feel right to
use just any old ICs. It was supposed to be a PC chip case. I never finished the case. Unfortunately I didn't have the idea to make the IC field transition into something else, like a solid colour, even
just the gray the case was before. Or maybe I didn't want to dso that. Nowadays I have some ideas where I could possibly get trunkloads full of ICs that I assume aren't recyclable otherwise. Maybe I
wouldn't use a big tower if I'd ever started this again.
Sofa PC
I had a sofa in my room. I don't remember where I got it. I probably picket it up from the street after somebody got rid of it. At the time I was thinking about andd
experimenting with getting a PC very quiet, if not silent, without compromising on performance. This was a much more prevalent topic at the time, because CPUs used more and more power with every new
model (peaking in the Pentium 4, which is famous for needing much more than 100 W at the clock speeds it was marketed for being able to run at). CPUs power consumption wasn't throttled in as many ways as
they are today. Coltage was usually fix, so it needed to be as high as you needed it to be at peak performance moments. Clock usually couldn't be changed dynamically. The CPU couldn't switch parts of
itself off when it didn't need them. And the power it consumed it needed for its single core; so there was no core to shut down, either, in idle moments. Other components usualy also used more power than
they do today. Motherboards were built by more individual ICs, chipsets didn't idle well either, voltage regulation wasn't as efficient for performance CPUs, hard disks needed more power than even
today's spinniung hard disks. Automatic, temperature-based fan control wasn't as advanced either when you wanted to regulate it for a chip's temeperature, and you had to place the sensor not only outside
of the chip, but usually outside of the cooler. And I wanted to have a surver run 24/7. I was actually running a few services on the internet from my bedroom at the time, of which one was used and relied
on at a daily basis. So, what I came up with was to build a PC into my Sofa. It had thick foam padding and a cotton filling, which made it sound proof at least to lover frequencies. I removed enough of
the cotton to give it a large room with wich to interchange air. And it sort of worked. It got hotter in there than I hoped. But it was pretty quiet. Now that I'm thining of it again, I could've done
some things to improve aitflow to the outside withou opening the sofa up too much to leak sound. There were no frequencies, apparently, at a multipe of the resonance frequencies of any of the wood panels
of the sofa. Sitting on it wasn't affected in any way. And the whole thing was easily accessable from the front. There was a cut-put right above the floor with a handle, with which you coulde pull out a
board, that slid out on small wheel. On the board all the components were mounted. I used parts from a relatively cheap ATX case to make the motherboard and drives mount easily. I never got it down to
the temperature I set out to get. And I couldn't use high-rpm hard disks because then that was the only noise in the room and it was very annoying. But it worked, and the sliding mechanism was fancy,
even though it was so simple to build. The cutout and handle were actually easy to overlook in the pattern of the fabric that the sofa already had. I got the ideaa for the sofa mod after I ran the server
inside my wooden desk for a while. That is another story. The sofa mod was kind of the enhanced version of the desk PC.
I wonder why I don't make things like these anymore. Because making something in a unique style that you like feels extra good on top of the feeling of making something yourself.