This would be looking upwards, inside the top half of the scanner. Here is one option, a single 80mm fan. It would have needed a 15mm fan though, and those are fairly difficult to find, unless you know where to look.

This was what I went with - two 60mm fans. One would be over the hard drive and floppy drive, and the other over the power supply. Two 60mm fans offered more airflow than a thin 80mm would, and the power supply benefited greatly from having its own fan.

And there is the view from the top, with the fan holes sliced out, and the grilles mounted. There are actually 4 holes here. Both of the visible ones actually go through two layers - the lid, and the case beneath.

There's one of the holes in, with a fan mounted to the bottom of the casing below it. Unfortunately, the lid didn't hold up to the stress very well, and two small cracks formed. I touched a marker to them, and they wicked the ink so as to make them visible. They never really got any larger than they are here though.

There's the "fanily" photo.(sorry) I realized that there were no real intakes in the case, so I added a little blower in the middle. Not much, but it was at least something. It blew air in the direction of the CPU, heading to the front of the case.

There's what the cooling and the protection looks like with the lid opened. There wasn't enough room to add grilles to both the lid and the casing, so I figured that this was the best option. The fans don't really have that much torque, so there's not much danger of any blender-style action.

Look again at the first picture at the top-right of the page - you'll notice I used standard fan screws to attach the grilles, but in the other pictures, there are nuts and screws instead. With the standard fan screws, when the lid was down, they stuck too far out of the bottom of it, preventing the lid from closing completely, straining the hinge. So I switched over to what I used throughout the project:

6/32 Philips head machine screws. These things are incredibly handy. I bought a small box of them at 3/4" long, and sliced them down to size as I needed them. These were used for mounting all kinds of things - the CD drive, the motherboard, fan grilles, and just about anything else that needed to be held in place.

I did have to flatten the heads of a few of them too, so that the lid would lay flat.
So there's the main exhaust vents, and one intake. They actually managed to keep the case down to around 40C. The power supply's heatsinks did reach a fairly toasty 48C, but that's where they stayed.
The only other fans in the system were on the CPU and the motherboard's chipset. I did wind up doing the 7V mod for the chipset fan. It was originally a Pentium cooler, and had a very loud 50mm fan. It made more noise by itself than the rest of the system did. At 7 volts though, it still did an adequate job of cooling, and it was nearly silent.
That about wraps it up for cooling. Now for the front panel. I wanted a decent front panel for this thing, not some shoddy on/off switch hanging out on a wire.
And of course, what computer is complete nowadays without front USB ports?

This red hunk of plastic was laying in a junk box for a few years, and now it had finally found a use. I scanned it into the computer, and converted it into a simple template for the location of the On/Off and reset switches, as well as power and HDD LEDs.

There is the printed template, along with an overlay of the circular button, taped onto the inside of the front of the scanner. I tried to do as much slicing as I could from the inside of the casing, so that any slips wouldn't be easily visible.

And here is the finished product. Power LED, power switch, slightly recessed reset switch, and hard drive LED. The red holder is held in place with epoxy.

Now I did mention front USB ports. It seems that I didn't take many pictures of them, and the only two I do have are going to be saved for the last page, which will have lots of nice close-ups of the finished project, from all around.
For the USB ports though, I took two dual-port assemblies that came from motherboards, and removed them from their metal backplates. They were scanned into the computer, and a template was made. This was taped onto the front of the scanner in the same manner as the LED's and switches. It took awhile to get the holes done right, as making rectangular holes with a round Dremel tool is rather difficult.
So anyway, head on to Page 4, and keep an eye out for the USB ports on the last page.

< < < Page 2

Page 4 > > >