Drives

The rear part of the case is basically taken care off here so I moved on to the front area. And the first thing to take care of are the drives mounting. Keeping with the acrylic theme, I used two 8mm thick acrylic sheets as mounting brackets.. if you wanna call them that! These brackets would be secured to the mobo tray by screws from the bottom of the mobo tray. 8mm thick acrylic sheets are strong enough to handle a CD-ROM, CDRW and a HDD. There should also be enough clearance around for cables and what not. You can see the "cut-off" on the brackets as the original rectangular sheet would cause the drive to protrude too far out on the front. The "cut-off" allowed the brackets to be pushed slightly backwards to rectify the problem.

mounting brackets

front view

side view

See the "cut-off"

With the drive mounting brackets completed, the major case structure/parts is in place. Mobo, PSU, cooling fans, drives all in and the system was also booted up to make sure everything was working and nothing is getting in the way of the other parts in there. Of course, with a front bezel, the case looks fugly so that's the next part that I'm working on..

lots of room here

rear view

almost there!

Front Bezel

The front bezel is of the same thickness and colour as the rear panel. White and tinted really look good together... heheh! First thing I gotta do is cut the round edges for the front bezel. It's easy to do and just take 5 minutes to finish it up. Unlike the rear panel, the front bezel would rest on the *outside* of the outer shell instead of *inside*.

Cutting the edges

virgin front bezel! :O)

Once the curves/edges are done, measurement is taken for the position of the drive trays and the USB/Firewire ports. The mobo comes with extra USB and Firewire ports on an expansion plate but these ports should go up front, not at the back! Heheh! As for the drives, I do not want the whole drive to be visible, only the tray. So I measured and cut rectangular openings for the tray and made custom acrylic bezels for them to blend in with the whole case theme. Just a quick note here... it's very important to get the alignment and measurement right for the drives tray as a mistake could mean that the tray would not eject out and the whole front bezel would be ruin and you'll have to start over with a new piece of acrylic sheet for it.

Once done, a test fit is always in order to make sure you get everything right! So far so good here! The tray alignment looks good and the tray ejects out OK.