I put together this mod over a period of about 9 or so months, with a number of fits and starts. I purchased a couple of B&W G3 350s a couple of years ago through a univeristy lab buy out. I immediately upgraded the RAM and HD and began to use them for various applications. But after a couple of revs of OS-X they just weren't cutting it anymore. I was looking to deploy a development version of OSX Server, so I decided to upgrade one of them substantially and use it. I figured a few hardware updates would get what I needed, but the look of the machine was becoming pretty dated, and they were fairly banged up to begin with.

 I looked at using various other cases, including an old NeXT Cube I had, but I decided to remain somewhat true to the original design. I'd seen many black, silver and mural-faced cases, but being a University of Kentucky Alumni and Employee, Blue and White seemed a good color combo -- just not the semi-opaque white and electric-baby-blue of the original.

So I decided to 'swap' colors, white where blue was and blue where white was, and choose shades of blue closer to those used by the UK Wildcats.

I added a few other technical mods while I was at it...the obligatory illumination, moving the power LED, adding disk activity LEDs, a small 4" LCD, upgrading the power supply, video, CPU, and network, etc.

Read on to see what worked and what didn't and how it turned out.

First thing was to determine the hardware upgrades. I selected a G4 700 upgrade from Sonnet, mostly based on cost. I added a gigabit ethernet card, a cheapo d-link, which not only failed to work under Tiger, but really only provided about a 10-15% boost in network performance -- pci bus was probably saturated. I also added a radeon 9200PCI, a pioneer DVD-RW (superdrive), and a couple of disc drives, since I wanted to mulit-boot. After all that I had periodic crashes and reboots, after swapping ram, and resinstalling several times. I suspected the power supply. I determined that an ATX powersupply could be used with a small modification. I also discovered I had a small ATX power supply whose transformer would fit inside the apple power supply case. I would suggest updating the PS on these machines, but I wouldn't suggest trying to cram an ATX into the Apple PS case unless you're comfortable with high-voltage electronics and have a fire extenguisher nearby. As it turned out, my G4 upgrade was bad, after sending that back to the helpful folx at Sonnet, I was back in business and ready to complete the rest of the mod.

Looking at some other mods, I liked the idea of a small integrated screen. Since the machine would share a monitor and keyboard an extra screen could give me some feedback at a glance. That and I had a small LCD looking for a home. The monitor is pretty low resolution, and driven via composite video, so most normal apps are pretty hard to read. I built a couple of small apps to show system load, etc. in giant fonts, but now mostly it just runs the Weather widget from Dashboard. However I was still wanting some more 'across the room' feedback, and something I'd gotten used to in the intel, sun, everything-else-in-the-world market was the idea of a drive activity indicated, aka HD LED.

Since the B&W uses plain-old PATA, and an 'activity' pin exists in the cable standard, I guessed, incorrectly, that Apple probably had a pin header or other place on the MB I could attach some LEDs and get the activity indication I was looking for...since they didn't, I was forced to solder into a couple of IDE cables. While this worked, the wires are tiny and fragile. I chose not to show any detailed pictures of the work since it is so horribly ugly. Were I to do it again, I would probably try to locate some 40 pin headers and solder into those. soldering into an 80pin flat cable was nearly impossible for me, an 'aftermarket' round cable was easier, but didn't fit in the case so well.

Now it was time for the actual case mods. First I stripped one of the B&Ws down to a shell. This has been illustrated many times, so I won't bore you with that. I decided to align the screen in the metal frame and cut that in first, then trace the needed opening in the plastic front afterward. Of course the only place to fit the little screen was where the speaker, power and reset pod is... No problem, I relocated the speaker to a location above the DVD, held down with double faced tape. And I relocated the control module to the front floor of the case, oriented now horizontally. Power and reset button access would require opening the case, but that wasn't a major consideration given its use and placemed. I did want to keep the power LED in a visible location, so I removed the existing LED, soldered in an extension cable. I attached to that a larger white-blue LED , drilled a hole behind the small apple logo in the front and nesteled the LED directly behind that  with yet more double-faced tape.

The donor monitor was a $45 unit acquired some time back from compgeeks.com, it made to be powered by a 12v wall-wart and fed a composite signal. I dismantled it's clunky plastic case, but in the end chose to keep the case mostly intact, just tossing the front bezel. After measuring and marking with a sharpie, I went to work with the dremel and jigsaw. The opening was a tad rough and oversized, but a little time with a metal file and some rouned over heavy duty electrical tape later, I had a pretty reasonable opening. I used the high-tech and mod-mandatory duct tape (and some metal duct tape) to hold the unit in place. I set aside the wall wart and soldered together a molex connector to provide 12v from the ATX PS to the little LCD.

Now it occured to me that I had some pre-established holes where the reset and nmi buttons were. Seemed like a reasonable place to stick those HD activity LEDs I spent so much time soldering together. There were, of course, a couple of problem. I used rectangular LEDs and round ones would be required to fit and look nice in the existing holes. And to route the cables cleanly, cables would need to be extented and the 5V input I soldered to the same molex as the 12v for the LCD would need to be relocated. Back to the iron. After a few more hours and bottles of DAB, everything was in place. Electric tape was again used to provide a firm and reflective free mount.

Essentially the machine ran in this configuration for several months, as it was operational, their wasn't much energy being put into the rest of the mod. Finally last holiday season I started work again. First step was the strip, sand and primer the pieces. I used the usual alcohol and sandpaper of various grits methods, and some steam and goo-gone to get off the serial number sticker and others. 

Onto the case mod...next I measured up my hole for the screen and cut that out using the dremel and jigsaw combo again, with the usual challenges related to melting and cracking. I taped across the area with duct tape and cut through that to reduce splintering, but it still took a lot of filing and still needs a bezel to be smooth. 

 Of course, there was still the issue of the speaker grill. I was worried about that, but my first attempt at filling it worked fine. I used vinyl wall patch spackle, in several thin coats, and rough sanded it between them...after about 6 coats you can't tell the speaker grill holes were ever there.

My last piece to finish was the obligatory goofy light. I selected a 'lightening' lamp, this thing has a 'lightening in a bottle' type thing going on, though its not visible in the photo.. It puts off a blueish light and its endcaps were painted to math the case. Power was ran to it through a hole drilled in the case and the transformer was in a narrow space above the PS.

Though you can't see it in the pics there are some imperfections in the top of the case. My initial design involved blue and silver, and the silver parts were going to be 'etched' which various groves and cracks, somewhat eminating from the lightening lamp. I experimented with various caustic chemicals (okay mostly acetone) to try to etch and craze the plastic. That plan worked only so far as it was impossible to control the crazing effect. I filled some and sanded them out, but I left a few as a remineder.

That's about it, everything still works and it's been completed for about 8 months. Nothing revolutionary, but at least some of the mods server a semi-useful purpose.

Write Comment

Name:
Comment:
Code:*
	I wish to be contacted by email regarding additional comments