|
An old Macintosh Plus gets a new life as a 64 bit monster. The Plus gets a new LCD monitor, and an Athlon64 and all of its friends get stuffed into the case to make a self contained computer.
Intro
It all started with this Macintosh Plus that i got off of eBay. I had seen things online with people turning macs into aquariums, which I’d seen online and in the book “Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks” by Scott Fullam. The Plus I got on eBay was still functional, and it came with 2 keyboards, 2 mice, and 2 external hard drive enclosures.
Disassembly
The plus disassembly wasn't that complicated, and that wasn't very interesting, so i won't discuss it too much. You can find this info on any old school mac mod page anywhere.
 
Here's a shot of the insides of the mac. Since the case is the only thing I need, this all has to go. I didn't want to do too much damage, as I wanted to mount a new monitor inside of this, I need the screws and screwholes intact.
The Monitor
Since putting another motherboard into a mac case has been done like a billion times before, I wanted to put a whole computer into the case. I want people to think it is a working mac! Well, people who wouldn't know the difference anyway ;). But i'm not going to leave a tiny little 20 year old monitor in there! I'm wanted to go high tech! So I found this nice little 7" widescreen lcd to put inside!
But since the new monitor is not 4:3 like the old, it doesn't fill up the entire hole left by the previous monitor. So out comes the plexi! I disassembled the LCD, took the face frame off, and cut a matching hole in the plexi. I then epoxied the frame in, and sanded everything down to prep for paint.
 
Here it is prepped, and after a few coats of paint. Not an expert at the old spray paint, so if you look real close you can see the eggshell thing going on. Most of this frame isn't visible when it is attached to the case, so it isn't too bad. I thought about cutting out just a hole the exact size of the LCD, but I'm not enough of a modder (yet) to relocate all the buttons and leds on this thing!
The Stuff
 
Here's the monitor mounted in the case, and all of the stuff that is going inside! hopefully those boxes are mostly packaging, because it doesn't look like all that will fit... Here's the parts list:
-
motherboard: MB GIGABYTE GA-K8S760M SIS760 RT
-
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Newcastle
-
heatsink/fan: oem stuff that came with the cpu
-
power supply: ENERMAX EG285SX-VB(W) SFM MicroATX 270W Power Supply
-
memory: CORSAIR Speed 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) x2
-
DVD: TOSHIBA SDM1912-TA Beige IDE DVD-ROM Drive
-
hard drive: who knows? it was in the closet and not plugged into anything
Here's a good compare/contrast of the old mac mb and the new gigabyte one. Interestingly, they are almost the exact same size! there is a BIG problem coming up, but you can't tell from this pic. if you knew the mac internals, you might be able to spot it right now, though. Hint: which ways are the 2 facing?
This is one of the details that you just might never notice, but i thought it was a pretty slick touch. The signatures of a whole host of Apple people are molded on the inside of the case! In this pic, Steve Jobs' signature is plainly visible right in the center. Oddly, its all lower case. never knew that before, but then again, I've never gotten a check from Jobs, so I wouldn't know.
Fabrication and Assembly
The original mac motherboard was actually mounted to the metal frame in that first pic, and that metal frame was anchored to the front portion of the case. I can't use that frame, because it takes up too much space, so i needed to find a motherboard tray I could mount the new board to. My first idea was to reuse a slide out tray from one of my other cases. The problem with that is that the tray was way bigger than the motherboard and case, and because I don't have any tools suitable for that hardcore of work. So I decided to just use plexi. I drilled some holes and mounted some metal motherboard standoffs in the plexi.
 
I then mounted some on the inside of the case that i could screw this down to. I left the original blue shielding (or whatever that is!) in the case, and just screwed through it.
 
I then mounted the motherboard to the tray inside the case. In the second pic, you can see what i was talking about in the pic comparing the sizes of the 2 motherboards. The original mac mb was about the same size and shape, but rotated about 90 degrees, taller than it was wide. in all of my original measurements, I'd kinda run into this, but I neglected the space that the monitor would take up inside the front of the case, and some other math.
 
I fabricated up a little box out of plexi to attach to the back of the case. The io cutout fits right in there, so that works out pretty slick. After some sanding to round off the edges and smoothing out the epoxy, I painted it up. it looks pretty decent, but since its the back, nobody will ever see it anyway!
After all that, I put in the chip, heat sink, and fan, so I could see where i could mount the powersupply. The PS is a microatx job thats pretty small. It turned out that mounting it to the top would be the best place, i could cut out the back to allow air flow and power cable mount, and a spot at the top near the carrying handle that is the perfect place to mount the fan and a grill. I also marked out a spot on the bottom to cut out and mount an 80mm fan for intake. the bottom of the case has little feet, so there's some room for airflow underneath. I also fabbed up a little bracket to mount to the dvd and hard drive, which also turned out to be a good place to mount the pc speaker.
 
Everything mounted up inside. Originally, I was using a serial ATA drive, so there wasn't so much cable madness, but mid mod that drive died on me, so I switched to another drive I had laying around. Sadly, you can see from this view that the only way to get access to the DVD is to pop off the front. I wanted to make the bottom of the front flip down and lay the drive horizontally, but there was no room to mount the dvd in there that way with the cpu fan and intake fan in there. Since I plan on running linux on this thing, I don't need to use the CD for much, except in some rare cases, so taking the front off isn't too big of a deal.
 
You can kind of see it here in this picture, but i also fabricated up another thing, a place to mount the power and disk LED's, and a place for the power and reset switches. I stole all of those from the case i planned on gutting the tray from. The old disk slot turned out to be a great place to hide those. The switches are tiny little black push buttons that were pressed originally by bigger buttons on the original faceplate. the faceplate also had a plastic mount for the led's, which i cut down to be flat. I then glued all that into another piece of plexi which was i then painted black. when mounted inside the drive slot, it just looks like its all in shadow, and you can't see the switches unless you're up close. You can't see the LED's unless they are on. Plug everything in, turn everything on, and it all fires up! I then installed the free version of Mandrake's amd64 version of 10.1. I think. maybe it was just 10?
Its so loud!
After the system ran for a while, i realized how loud it was. I have a Shuttle PC box running a database and web stuff right next to it, and its pretty quiet. this new Mac box was super loud compared to that! so I went trolling the Ars Technica case and cooling forum to find some quiet fans. What i found was a slick looking zalman copper deal that looked like it should fit. so back to newegg for that, and some slim 80mm fans that appear to be used mostly for cooling off video cards:
-
heatsink+fan: ZALMAN CNPS7000B-CU
-
case fan: ZALMAN ZM-OP1 80mm
 
You can see that the zalman fan has a long thing attached to it. its a controller to allow adjustment of the fan speed from 100% down to however quiet you want it. Know what? there is actually a PERFECT place for that in original Mac Plus case! the Mac originally had a contrast knob at the bottom, which I had just hot glued into its original location to maintain the stock look.
The contrast knob only needed a little modification, involving just a little cutdown of the knob on the zalman device and some hot glue. I then glued that into the inside of the front part of the frame in the knobs original mac location. put everything back together, and fire everything back up. The new fans are so much quieter. It is even quieter than the Shuttle pc next to it! Turning down the knob makes an obvious difference in sound, but since its so quiet anyway, I have that all maxed out.
Epilogue
All in all, it was a good time, but there are still some things I'd like to clean up. I'd like to clean up the cable situation inside, add a much bigger drive, repaint the I/O extension thing, etc.
A modder's work is never done!
|
