LED Ports and Drive Buttons

Not having the whole drive visible on the front bezel means that the drive activity LEDs and buttons would be hidden behind the bezel. To solve this, holes were drilled in line with the LEDs and buttons on the drives itself. For the LEDs, 3mm holes were drilled and acrylic rods inserted into it to act as "fibre optic" channels to direct the light from the LEDs to the front.

Holes drilled

3mm acrylic rods inserted

close up..

LEDs lights up!

For the buttons, small rectangular holes were drilled and filed to size inline with the drive buttons. Using small pieces of acrylic, buttons were made and held in place with chloroform or acrylic glue. Exact measurement is important to get the custom made buttons to work as intended. To long and it'll be always pressing on the drives switch inside. Too short and it would not reach the switch when pressed. Of course, longer would be easier to work with as you can always file it down to just the right size.

drive buttons

All done

testing of buttons...

Switches and LEDs Assembly

Case structure done... drives installed... buttons made...only thing left is the switch assembly! Oh how I would love to get my hands on those cool Bulgin switches at this stage! Oh well, work with what you have! LOL! Anyway, I found this nice switches at a local electronics store. The silver switch was cool but the rather huge protruding black main body wasn't really nice. Plus, it'll look really out of place at the front of the case. So instead of showing the whole switch, I would just show the silver part of the case. To do this, I had to construct a custom bracket to mount them on. The switches would be mounted on the bracket and only the silver part would be allowed to protrude out on the front bezel.

Nice switches but ugly body

Close up

the custom bracket

The bracket is then mounted from the inside of the front bezel with screws. The holes for the screws were not drilled thru the acrylic. I had to use really short screws for this.. heheh! This prevents the screws from being seen on the front. The front bezel looks clean in this way! 5mm acrylic rods were used as "fibre optic" channel for the LEDs and the silver part of the switch really looks cool on the bezel with this method of mounting!

bracket secured

close up

glow from LED

nice!