Background
My old PowerBook has led a tough life. I bought it a few years ago with the screen hanging off (broken hinges). Having successfully repaired the hinges and resprayed it (the paint was peeling of the Titanium) it was as good as new. However, after a few years of hard use everyday, it eventually developed a screen fault and collected some new knocks and scratches. It seemed a shame to throw out such a tough old machine because of a screen problem. So I decided to join the case modding fraternity.

Construction
Essentially, the case is made of two sheets of white acrylic, bolted together by socket countersunk screws. I’ve used 15mm chrome pipe as the four spacers between the acrylic sheet. The perforated steel was cut to my specifications by a very helpful chap found on eBay. Cutting the CD drive slot was a little tricky, as was drilling the power button hole, but once done they seem to function ok.



Parts
The parts are just cheap odds and ends I had laying around (the acrylic was an off cut from a shower wall). Just for reference here’s the list of where I got what:

Acrylic/PVC sheet 
Socket countersunk screws 
Creative speakers 
Perforated steel

Tricky bits
Manoeuvring the motherboard into place with all of the drives etc. attached is a bit of a struggle. The CD drive doesn’t like having
pressure applied to the top of it’s case. The tolerances inside the slim drive are so tight, even the slightest deformation of the case will have a detrimental effect (i.e. I broke one!).

I ditched the naff PowerBook speakers which meant utilising the original headphone socket, which like the PCMCIA slot faces down. So I fitted an extension cable with a right angle plug to move the port to the back. The power button also had to be moved- I just soldered on extended leads. Cutting the slot in the perforated steel was a challenge and required drilling, jigsawing and filing. But... by far the biggest snag was finding a way to force the PowerBook to believe that it’s lid was closed and make it run in external monitor mode. Initially, because there was no lid/chassis attached, it would run in dual monitor mode, displaying on the internal screen which wasn’t connected. Switching to mirror mode doesn’t help because the external monitor resolution is then limited to the same as the built-in display.

The only way around this was to reconnect the trackpad and glue a tiny magnet (I actually used a small redundant one from inside the PowerBook) over the sensor which lets the machine know the lid is closed. A USB keyboard, mouse and monitor must be connected other wise the machine closes itself down.

Cool side effects The machine has it’s own built-in UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) because it still retains the original laptop battery. The machine runs much cooler, thanks to all the extra space. So you could add a much bigger heat sink/fan and overclockit (I didn’t).