More Cutting!!

Well, ten minutes after starting with the Nibbler, my faceplate went from "oh crap" to "damn, it's getting there!"....LOL! This thing was a life saver. So controllable and easy to use. No mess, except for some little metal squares that are alot easier to clean up than metal powder from the filing! I mean you'll still have to file, but no where near what you would've had to.

As for the smaller cutouts like for the eject button and such, the nibbler head probably won't fit in there. It didn't for me in this case. So what I did was drill out as much as I could, again being VERY careful, and then filing the rest. Not so bad filing a small little button cutout as compared to a huge gap the size of the face of the drive.

The nibbler has been ,by far, the absolute MUST HAVE if your doing this mod. And the best part is, it's only $8.99 at Directron.com. RadioShack carries them nibblers too if you're interested. I'm tellin` ya, this thing saved me so much time I may buy another 12 of them in case there's an international shortage, I'll always have one ...hehe. Bottom line: Go Buy One Right Now if you don't have already own one.

If you don't believe me, try filing by hand for about about 3 hours, then use the nibbler and I guarantee you'll do as much work in 30 seconds with the nibbler then you did in 3 hours of filing. So do as I tell you, not as I've shown you... hehe.... Get the nibbler FIRST!, then drill, or RTX-a-ma-tize, a big pilot hole big enough for the nibbler head, and go to town! :o) The nibbler makes a very very clean cut and you can almost cut it right down to the finished product. But some finishing filing will make it even nicer.

Here I decided to just sand off the logos on the tray piece for the dvd since they pretruded and would give the Carbon Fiber Sticker Sheet a weird look. A few seconds with my power sander and they were nowhere to be found again. Wipe the piece and/or clean thoroughly with soap and water type (technical term) cleaning. I then put the piece onto the sheeting and cut around leaving some room for error and trimming. Then peel adhesive backing, apply to the piece, wrap around the front of it, trim with a sharp razor.

***At this point, you could also just paint the tray cover black, or silver, and be done with it. I really wanted to play with the Carbon Fiber look, so I went with that this time***

After you smooth it out and get rid of any air pockets ( you can poke a hole with a needle to release trapped air in a pinch), you'll want to use some silver paint, or paint marker( my choice) to color the buttons and anything else that might be showing thru the cracks. The Metallic silver paint marker shown previously , I was really impressed with. It took me a couple minutes to finally get the paint flowing the first time, but when it did, it came out really nice, dried quickly, and looked very good. No smears or bubbling.I just ran it over the eject button,etc a couple times and it was perfect. Not too thick or thin. Give the new paint maybe 10 minutes to dry ( this stuff don't take long) and then your ready to assemble you're new custom aluminum faceplate. *crosses fingers*

Looks a little better than a beige one don't ya think? :o)

Lookin` good. I just wish I would've started with the damn nibbler..( still obsessed with that thing ) ..hehe...You have no idea how much crap I went thru to get it to this point! LOL! Well folks that just about wraps this how-to up for ya. Hopefully someone out there got an idea or a solution. ( or everyone's running out to buy silver paint...LOL!) Some of you guys may have seen me post my aluminum floppy mod awhile back. That was my first attempt at it. Didn't really take too many "in-progress" shots. But, here is a few "just cuz" for you guys, that are thinking about doing this mod, to look at.

The floppy is done the say was as the above larger drive, sand faceplate to fit into aluminum cover, scribe, drill, nibbler, file, and push fit....lol....sounds easy right? :o) Notice the eject button and the "flap" are painted silver also.. Like I said earlier, all I did was run over it a couple times with the metallic silver paint marker. That thing is great....heh..No mess, no fuss and it comes out great.

Just a few more final shots. I did the floppy with no nibbler and my hands are still soar from all that filing. Never again I tell you!....Nibbler from the start!! hehe. But I'm pretty happy with the end results. I definitely can't say "it's worth it for everyone"....but If a lian li case is your only, or main, case, and you plan on keeping it a long time, and you dont mind mangling your drives faceplate for some bragging rights....then this mod is for you...lol.

If you're the type to changes cases, or "looks" to your system alot, then this isn't for you!. It does take alot of work to come out with an acceptable product.

Also, again, you'll be modifying the drives beige faceplate quite a bit making it pretty impossible to simply revert back to slapping the drive in with a few other beige drives. The worst part about it will be the noticeably skinnier face on it then the other non-modded ones. But , if you follow thru with it, and take your time, you'll have a really kick ass looking drive that perfectly matches your Lian Li and should also be the envy of your friends at the same time. (always a plus in our line of work ..hehe).

So this wraps it up guys. I hope ya liked it. If you have any questions,etc gimmie a hollar or head over to the Forums and ask away! Over and out from Da' Hideout!