Macro Case by macroman

Adding Castors...

Yeah that’s right castors. If like me, your pc sits on the floor and is constantly being dragged in and out for modding or upgrades then castors are a godsend.

Besides, the feet Lian-Li supply are the cheap plastic type found on sub £30 no name cases bought from computer fairs. A few holes drilled in the base are all it takes.

The original supplied feet were changed in preference for locking castors.


Keeping to my plan of retaining the original looks I decided to “stealth” the CD drives. Nothing complicated, just cut off the sides of the blanking plates and stick them to the CD tray fronts using double sided sticky pads. I like to see activity lights when my drives are running, especially the CD-RW. So I fitted fibre optic lighting to the metal panels. I used an old audio optical cable as the fibre optic, (as used with minidisk players), although Maplin sell the un-terminated cable. This cable had a 1mm diameter core.

The cable insulation was stripped off and the bare 1mm fibres push fitted into a 1mm hole drilled through the drive bay panel. A dab of thick super glue stops the fibres from working loose over time. Accurate positioning of the hole is crucial for the whole thing to work. The hole and hence the fibre has to line up exactly with the drives onboard led. The fibre is cut flush to the front panel making it almost invisible when the drive led is not lit. I put a drop of clear acrylic varnish on the ends of the fibre to fill any imperfections in the surface, which would reduce the fibres light transmitting ability.

Close up of DVD fibre from the front.


Rear of DVD panel showing the fibre super glued in place. (The fibre lines up with the drive led). Here you can see the sticky pads holding the panel in place. The out of focus black blob towards the far end of the panel is a small stick on rubber foot. (As used under speaker boxes etc). The sticky pads holding the bay panel in place have just the right amount of “give” to allow the foot to operate the drive eject button when the bay panel is pressed.

Twin fibres for the CD-RW - which are the same as the CD except there are 2 leds to display.


Both drives work perfectly in the open position: