Hypercube² Part I

POLISHING THE HARD DRIVES

All of the interior elements of the cube have to be in the same style: white / metal / chrome. Because of this, the stickers on the harddrives have to go and the metal needs a bit of polishing.


Here\'s the victim: one of the two brandnew Maxtor 80Gb hard drives I bought for the project - time to let it shine. I had never attempted this before, so I was actually a little scared of it. After searching the bit-tech forums, I found an excellent Mod Guide by Sil3nt - all the credit goes to him.


<ol><li> Removing the sticker with my trusty scalpel knife :-) </li><li> It comes off very easily. </li><li> Almost everything removed, just the circle in the middle to go, wondering what\'s underneath... </li><li> I\'m keeping the sticker in case I need it again for some reason (maybe I can stick it back on when the HD doesnt work anymore ;-) </li></ol>

After that, all the dirt and leftovers of the sticker have to be removed. This is an easy job with aceton and a dry cloth.


For those hard-to-shift spots, I used a cotton bud / cuetip dipped in acetone


<ol><li>Here\'s where my Dremel comes in play for the first time in the entire mod. I\'m gonna use Carpolish and my dremel with the polish bit on it. </li><li> After applying the polish and letting it dry for a bit, I started the polishing process (like Sil3nt said in straight lines, not circles. After this was done I saw a lot of stripes on the plate, it really looked crappy... what did I do wrong ?? </li><li>I tried to polish these stripes out with the small sanding machine with a polish cloth on it. </li><li> After 2 hours of polishing all the lines were gone and it looked like this: the polished HD in the foreground; the acetone-only result in the background. This is enough for me, and I\'m happy enough with the result - it\'s not a mirror but it\'ll do for now. </li></ol>

Here you the difference is very noticeable. I guess I don\'t have to say which one is the polished HD ;-) Like I said it\'s not a mirror finnish, maybe I can do something about this later.




The blue light reflected in the HD is from my main PC - it has a few blue LED fans.