The Classical Imperium  

yet another completely over the top pc case mod

as biult by Ralph Klimek somewhen about 1990

The Imperium case mod  was created to address a specific need. Sometime about 1990 she-who-must-be-obeyed decreed that there were to be no computers in the house. At this time when I still cared,  obeying every merest whim I complied but still sadly missed my computer. So i biult this cabinet, without specifying its purpose to anyone but myself. The PC innards are attached to a metal plate on roller guides which pull out the back for servicing and upgrades. It started off as an PC XT and over the years not a trace of original electronics remains. It was biult before CD roms became commonplace and internal horizontal space does not admit the installation of 5 1/4 drives mounted horizontally. This is its only design deficiency.  The wood is all second hand building material, the wood material is excessively thick and ridiculously over engineered. It was biult for appearance sake only.  The monitor for this version was smuggled into the house under the pretence of being a television.  This trangression of mine went unnoticed for some 5 years until two and two were placed together but by then the original commandment had been forgotten. The Triton permits you to cut perfect mitres in the hardest of old scrap hardwood. The top piece is cut to fit perfectly into a rebate into the top mitred frame. There is a fan at the bottom blowing cold up upwards. This is good thermally but in practice the fan inlet is close to the floor and seems to blow in a lot of dust, an easily serviceable fan filter is a must.

The Classical Imperium,

a PC case mod for the discerning gentleman of rank , power and humbug

front door allowing access to the floppy drive

In its PC xt configuration the back door used to completely close. By the constraints imposed by my not very well thought out interior design I can no longer completely close the back door. You can see part of the roller rails holding a metal plate to which the motherboard, PSU and drives are attached. There is no room for a CD drive...that my fault for not looking into the future. There were no such things in 1990 at hobbyist prices.

If I was to do this again I would have used lighter grade of plywood for the sides, proper provision for optical drives and naturally, a design to take the ATX style device. This did not exist when this was constructed.  An upgrade to the micro-ATX format would require new metal work and then the back door could be closed. At this point in time its hosting an old pentium 3 and running Doze-98, but only so it can run some old favourite PC games that cannot be convinced to run on XP.