Team Fortress 2 Dispenser Mod

Materials and Planning

As any experienced modder will tell you, building elaborate case mods like this can be an expensive process. Aside from all the tools and hardware there's all the materials to think about too.

Even assuming you don't mess something up at one stage or another (which is unlikely) then you'll still have a lot of wood and steel to account for, so it's important to reuse / recycle where you can.

In order to help keep this mod a little more low-cost and a little more planet-friendly, I began brainstorming places to salvage materials from and what pieces and scraps could be recycled from old pieces of furniture.

For this particular project the first step was to find a source of wood needed to build the body of the Dispenser. An old desk fitted the bill perfectly and was promptly disassembled to form the bulk of the Dispenser's chassis.


These big slabs o' lumber will eventually form the main structure of the Dispenser, but I had to first make sure that the two boards are cut exactly the same. At this early stage any errors are inexcusable and will only be made more noticeable and harder to correct the longer you leave them.

To guarantee you end up with two identical pieces after cutting I used a dead simple technique - clamp the two sheets together and cut through with a single pass. This helps to ensure that errors are completely avoided.


After the sides were cut to measure (remember: measure twice, cut once, mod forever!) they were clamped to the back board to ensure that they were the right shape and size.

The bottom-front of the Dispenser was then cut from another piece of salvaged desk. Measurements here have to be just as exact as before even though there's only one piece being cut, not two. Small mistakes can take huge amounts of time later to correct and, as varied as the modders in the bit-tech forums are, I doubt that any of them actually enjoy doing large amounts of sanding.