Door dilemna
 

I have a supermicro case, which if you aren't familiar with has a slight curve to the front bezel. I'm about to retire my bubblejet 200e, the front access panel of which just happens to exactly match this curve - so I'm thinking it would make a nice door for the drive bay area. There's a problem though, it's about 2 inches too narrow. You can see what i mean in this pic, sorry for the lousy quality:

http://www.geocities.com/legend65/2.html

So, I have 2 options.

1) Make 1 full length door for the 6 bays that leaves a gap on the right. I could either leave the gap open, or maybe attach a piece of tinted acrylic or something to fill it. There will be enough left over to also stealth the floppy.

2) Cut it in half and make 2 doors that are 4 bays long. I'd pull the bay cool 3 back out flush with the front. There won't be any leftover for the floppy.

I don't use the fan in the bay cool so blocking it with a door isn't a problem, though i may in the future so option 2 is more future safe. I still like both options though

Suggestions?

I would honestly just think about investing in a new case...


What you could possibly do, is make a screen like door (with aluminum mesh). That you could cut to fit.

I think option 2 would be much better, option 1 without the acrylic would look really bad, with the black acrylic it could look nice, but I dunno. Also with having two bays left, it could look very nice, if you leave your two most used bays without the cover, it would be particularly useful

Webmasta33: Over my dead body ;) I got that case because it was the best looking full tower I could find, and still think it is. This was just for the heck of it, my only real problem with the case is the way they did the back panel you can only put a 60 mm fan behind the cpu when there's enough room for an 80 or bigger. But a dremel could fix that easily enough.

I'm going with the double doors, I'll be updating the link I posted above with pics as I go along.

As a side note, is there a clear pic of the procooling snowflake somewhere? Was considering a subtle snowflake somewhere on the case.

i think Joe will be able to talk to you about the snowflake, it wouldn't be too hard to replicate though, even if you just used m$paint and a calculator

You take a hexagon.. that's the outside of the snowflake... Then you take another hexagon, start from the original hexagon, and rotate it 30 degrees. This "should" make it line up right. Then you just fill in the other parts of the snowflake, but those two hexagons give you your basic geometric proportions.

I should be able to recreate it from the logo at the top of the page just with flip/rotate, just figured someone might save me the trouble :)

Cutting done
 

Okay, doors are cut to size and I got a coat of paint on. I worked out some primitive hinges that I think will work ok with a little tweaking. I just put a rod through the doors. At the top it just slips into a hole drilled in the bezel, the bottom was a little more difficult because I have to keep those bottom 2 bays unobstructed, so I put a bend in the rod and went into the side of the bezel.

http://www.geocities.com/legend65/2.html

I was going to paint the baycool black too, but I think it looks nice as is.

Now I just have to work out a way to hold them closed, and decide whether to leave them plain black or dress them up a little.

Must...trash...floppy drive..............

They're the root of all that is evil.....

So, one more time..

http://www.geocities.com/legend65/2.html

I haven't decided a) whether i like it and b) whether i can cut all that out with just a knife without screwing up. The rheobus is behind there so the blue leds would somewhat light up the snowflake at night.. it could be nice.