Born from the embers of a smoldering pile of discarded modern day computing refuse, the Wallstreet Road Warrior is ready to take on the toughest boardroom store-bought PC laptops.
Background
This G3 Wallstreet PowerBook came to me as a bunch of parts in a cardboard box last winter. After a grueling career crunching accounting numbers day after boring day, this laptop had given up and literally fallen apart. It was being cast aside, and giving it to me was the last stop before my friend just tossed it in the dumpster. I couldn’t believe my luck. It only had a few minor problems…
Like most PowerBooks of this vintage, this one had a broken port where the AC adapter plugged in, so you had to hold the adapter just right and stand on one foot to get it to run and not just throw sparks. Of course, this didn’t matter since the adapter was fried.
But no power was a minor problem compared to the display problem. The problem being that it was not actually attached to the rest of the laptop. It seems that on the Wallstreet’s last day, the folded-up post-it that was jammed in the hinge to keep the display from slamming closed, fell out. But instead of slamming closed, the lid fell backwards, snapping both hinges completely off.
I don’t have any pictures of this stage, because I was really just messing around with the parts. I had no thought of doing a “mod” project, but I did want to see if I could get it to work. I started by taking it apart and soldering the AC port back to the board. I had done this to a PowerBook at work and it had worked fine, so I wasn’t too scared to try. Remember kids…always practice on work equipment before destroying your own :-)
In the meantime, I found out the AC adapter was under a repair extension program from Apple, so I filled out the online form and a new one showed up in the mail. After plugging in the loose display cables, I tried booting the 2-piece laptop and it worked! cool. Now I had to figure out what to do about connecting the display to the laptop and this is where my mod began.
On To The Mod
After trying to come up with several ways to reconnect the display in a way that would be functional but not look like a duct-tape-and-bailing-wire trailer-park fix-it job, I came to the conclusion that it just couldn’t be done without kind of looking like something out of the Road Warrior.
Then it hit me. If it was going to look “kind of” like something out of the Road Warrior, I had better just go all the way. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing I always say. I decided that I would turn this into a big, ugly, road-hardened, sticker-plastered, borg-assimilating, machine.
Step 1 – The Hinge
So I started with the biggest piece of junk hinge I had in my shop – an old brass toilet seat hinge as big as a Sony PSP.
  
Then I removed all of the plastic that I could from the display. Next I experimented with finding pieces of junk that I could attach to the delicate display parts and in turn mount to the massive hinge.
I used an acrylic clipboard to protect the back of the display and found little doodads to mount it around the edge of the display, using nuts and bolts instead of glue or rivets wherever I could, so that this thing could be disassembled and worked on if needed.
As you can see, I started plastering stickers and writing graffiti as I went so I could build up a layered I-don’t-care-what-it-looks-like, skateboard kind of a look.
I also found a piece of metal channel that fit perfectly along the bottom of the screen. I thought it dressed it up nicely from the front, and I could firmly attach it to the broken hinge pieces and the new hinge securely. I drilled out the pieces and used three little nuts and bolts on each side; this firmly attached it to the display.
The spread of the hinge was very large, so I needed to come up a couple of inches of spacer junk between the new metal channel and the new hinge, so there would be enough of an offset so that the display could close properly.
I found a big red piece of aluminum with some random electrical connection on it that fit perfectly. I attached it to the channel and then I drilled and tapped holes in the piece and bolted it to the hinge.
Voila, the display and PowerBook were re-united.
I wrapped the film-like cables around the hinge so the display could open and close without pulling the cables loose, or getting pinched when it closed.
The only problem now was getting the display to stay open at a workable angle. I played with a few ideas, and decided that what I needed was a limiting hinge like on the sides of a briefcase, so the lid stays open. So I went to the Salvation Army and spent the first $2 of the project on the perfect briefcase to cannibalize. I also picked up a few Atari cartridges…but I digress.
  
I played around with the hinge placement until I found the position that worked when opened and closed, and in a place I could mount it to the bottom half of the PowerBook.
In order to mount it of the bottom, I removed the hard drive and made a slight modification to the mounting bracket with a Dremel so the hinge could clear.
I used a short bolt with a couple of washers to make the attachment.
Step 2 – The Handle
I really liked the handle on the old briefcase I used for the hinge limiter, and so I decided that this really needed to be part of the project.
I found places in the back panel of the bottom half where I could drill and mount the handle without blocking any major port. It fit perfectly and is really solid since it’s mounted with more little nuts and bolts all the way through the frame.
Step 3 - The Control Panel
In attaching the hinge and handle I removed… and… kind of destroyed all the plastic between the top of the keyboard and the display, including all the little plastic switches for controlling volume, brightness, contrast and… uh… power. So I fabricated a new one with lots and lots of little toggle switches.
The old plastic switches really just pressed down on some little surface-mounted bubble switches. (I’m sure they have a more formal name… sorry) If you carefully peel off the little plastic bubble you find an inner and outer copper ring. I spent days and days soldering tiny wires to the contacts and then to all the switches. I worked with the switches I already had, which were only 2-position, so I had to hook up one switch for volume up, and a second for volume down, one for contrast up, etc. That’s ok with me; the more switches the better.
For power, I had a broken G4 PowerBook top case that still had a power button attached, which I salvaged for the job. Here you can see the TINY solder points.
I drilled a tiny hole in the panel so the LED would still light up when the power is on.
Somehow, although highly functional and cool looking, the little power button seemed a little too dainty, and it was bugging me. The solution was step 4.
Step 4 - Key Start Ignition
Yes. The Road Warrior needed to be started with a key. But I already had the power button installed and working, and I didn’t have a car ignition switch lying around. I did, however, have an on/off key switch from an alarm, which made a good compromise.
I mounted it to the bottom of the display where it seemed to fit perfectly. So now you turn the key and hit the switch to start it, and if you want, you can turn it off and remove the key to lock it.
Step 5 – Speaker
When I removed the plastic above the keyboard, I had also removed one of the speakers. Two little PowerBook speakers barely did the job, so one would just not do… unless it was bigger. I had some internal iMac speakers that I always thought sounded pretty decent for their size. Now that the key switch was hanging off the bottom of the right side of the display, it looked a little off-balance… relatively speaking. So I hung a single speaker off the bottom of the left side of the display using a bracket and a hose clamp.
 
Then to give the speaker a little more input power, I ran both the right and left channel to the one speaker through some thin armored cable. Extra exposed cables are even better than extra toggle switches.
Step 6 – Bitchin’ Paint
The black plastic just had to go, although I did still want it to retain a little of the original look to respect its heritage, so a paintjob it was. I wanted it to look like metal, so I chose a metallic Hammer-Finish gold Rustoleum that I had left from making a homemade trophy for our foosball tournament… but I digress again.
I masked off the case, being extra careful about the mouse button and trackpad.
I cleaned the surface and laid down a coat of regular grey primer spray paint.
 
When it was pretty dry, but not fully hardened, I sprayed the gold so it would get a real good bond. Then I let the whole thing bake in the sun for a few hours.
 
For some silver accents I used the remarkable silver Sharpie pen. It may wear off the button in time, but a new coat is pretty quick and easy.
Upgrades/Conclusion
Since “finishing" the Mod, I’ve gone back and upgraded a few things. I bought a FireWire card on eBay for about $20 bucks, and filled the other PC card slot with the airport card out of an Airport base Station (that the owner gave me because the other board was fried). Then I upgraded the 2GB hard drive to a 40GB after we upgraded my wife’s “real” PowerBook to an 80GB. That prompted me to load OSX 10.2, which it now runs like a champ. I tried to load 10.3 with bad results, so for now it’s stuck at Jaguar. Total cost so far has been about $22 bucks, plus spray paint. But what’s money anyway, in this post-apocalyptic world?
 
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