Ingraham by Jeffrey Stephenson

Finishing touches and core hardware

The case’s centrepiece is a chrome-plated, billet aluminium, knurled-edge custom Harley Davidson gas cap made by Arlen Ness Motorcycles of Dublin, California. The idea for a circular centrepiece was inspired by the aviation look of the grill with its two round symmetrical vents. I wanted to continue this aircraft-inspired design theme that was so popular during the post-WW2 era. The large baby moon shaped circle was supposed to invoke the idea of a spinning propeller.


The “Ingraham” logo was laser-printed onto waterslide decal paper. After the decal was applied and dried I brushed a coat of lacquer across the top of it. Since the decal slide paper is also lacquer-based, the paper melted leaving only the ink behind.

Ingraham’s computer equipment is built around VIA’s new VB8001 mini-ITX mainboard. It has a VIA 1.6GHz Nano CPU soldered to the board and a full 16x PCIe expansion slot. The board supports up to 4GB of DDR2 memory, which was provided by Crucial Technology.

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Also from Crucial is its 2.5in 64GB SSD used in place of a standard hard disk drive. In lieu of an optical drive (I use a portable USB optical drive when I rarely need one) I am using 8GB Lexar USB flash drives in conjunction with the two front-mounted USB ports.


With a lack of an easy way to mount the 2.5in Crucial SSD properly, I opted for a 3.5in external drive caddy which can also be mounted in a standard 3.5in bay through use of an adapter.