First G5 Case Mod With Lasercut Back Panel

[boukeregnerus]

Hi everybody,

I have been following this forum for a few months now and decided to post some "in progress" pictures of a G5 casemod I am currently working on.

It started when I came across this used G5 case that "some guy" started modding but never finished. It had quite a solid motherboard standoff from Lian-Li which was good but it also had a really ugly bottom plate with two holes where fans used to go , large holes in the back panel and a broken front panel.



I started off by thoroughly cleaning the case and removing all the tape and ugly plates. Since I have access to a lasercutter at my university I bought some black acrylic sheets and lasercut a fan bracket, backplate and bottom plate out of the acrylic sheets. (if anyone is interested in the vector files for these I'd happily share them here but note that they are quite custom to this particular build).



Currently I am working on creating a new custom front-panel since the old one was completely broken and I found that buying a used front-panel was relatively expensive.

To be continued...

 

[Michael-Hurtle]

Looks very good so far, hope to see the finished result of it!

 

[rickyreall84]

I have also noticed that the front panel... I hope you talking about the powerswitch/USB/audio/firewire has gone really high in price on ebay. Its honestly the same price to just buy another case just for the front panel. I really like the custom back panel and front fan mount you have going so far and patiently waiting for more progress on this build. I would really like to know what your doing with the bottom panel? fan mounts? I was also wondering if you are going to keep the black or paint them?

Thanks
Rickyreall

 

[boukeregnerus]

I have also noticed that the front panel... I hope you talking about the powerswitch/USB/audio/firewire has gone really high in price on ebay. Its honestly the same price to just buy another case just for the front panel. I really like the custom back panel and front fan mount you have going so far and patiently waiting for more progress on this build. I would really like to know what your doing with the bottom panel? fan mounts? I was also wondering if you are going to keep the black or paint them?

Thanks
Rickyreall

About the front panel: I am planning on changing the default USB with an USB 3.0 port which I bought on eBay. I also bought a 3.5mm stereo audio jack (the PJ328B) I yet have to experiment with this but in theory it should support both audio and a microphone through this port (the four pole headphone jacks) and can be connected to the internal audio connector.

The bottom panel had this big hole in it when I bought it, I'm guess that the previous owner used to have fans in there but since I already have two 140mm at the front and one 120mm fan at the back it seems kind of overkill to place more fans at the bottom. Therefore the bottom panel will just be a plain piece of black acrylic which I will probably laser cut the coming week.

I am not going to paint the black aluminium or the case, I think that by painting it will probably never look as clean as it does right now. Yes, I would have loved to have the back panel in aluminum (like the Laser Hive ones) but with the resources available to me this was not very feasible.

More pictures will be added probably the coming week or when I finished the bottom panel.