next, an old cd drive fell victim to my newly purchased sheetmetal nibbler, muhahaha. as you can see i totally exposed the cd and also did a little design behind it. this meant i had to epoxy a 1/8" thick plexi sheet on top of the drive to hold the spindle in place. that was a mistake
where the epoxy didn't fill in it looked funny and worse, the spindle wasn't lined up quite right (those things have pretty tight tollerances) so it didn't work. well, much later on i ripped the top off along w/ the offending epoxy, realligned it, and countersunk some machine screws in there to hold it tight, worked beautifully and looked sooo much better. oh, and this started out completely beige. i also painted the tray to fade to dark blue from the exterior black. a word of advice, vinyl dye is worth the extra time and money when you're painting plastic (although some brands do work better than others, duh)