From jdosborn@wam.umd.edu Sun Jun 8 23:52:11 2003 Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 23:43:48 -0400 (EDT) From: Justin D Osborn To: Chris Mulligan Cc: "Alex 'fe3db@ck' Perry" , maxop@mbhs.edu, minop@mbhs.edu, Justin Osborn Subject: Re: binx room is HAPPY On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Chris Mulligan wrote: > On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Justin D Osborn wrote: > > > A better story is the Silver Arrow casemods. :-) > > > > There's a whole story to them? Do share. > Well, it all started in software design class. It was getting boring and we were running into some dead ends with our project. That is, me and Ben Roberts. I forget who's idea it was, but we figured we could install a fan in Silver Arrow to get some airflow. We had to do it while the case was on of course, to keep the uptime. Somehow we figured out that Fischer Technik power connectors fit nicely into the Molex power connectors from a PC power supply. It would've been fine except I put the Fischer Technik connectors into the Molex connector first, and then I was going to stick those wires into the wires from the fan. While doing that I slipped, touching a power wire to the case, which grounded the power supply and shut Arrow down. Oops. :-) Then we figured we had a nice fan in there, but there weren't really any holes in the front of the case to let air in. (This is the best one) So one day while Ms. Collins was out and Mrs. Dvorsky was sort of watching us in the lab, I snuck down to R+E, borrowed a DeWalt cordless drill and came back. There were bumps on the case in a 5x6 pattern, which was just perfect for our purposes. With a towel or something covering the drill I drilled each hole very slowly so as not to make much noise. Mrs. Dvorsky never noticed, and what's more, we kept the uptime that time. If you look at the holes in the front of the case, there are probably still plastic nibs left around the back side of the holes from drilling. Then...adding windows to a case had just started becoming popular, so once during class we snuck down to R+E and scouted out materials, mainly a scrap piece of polycarbonate and some bolts. We may have drilled the starting holes during software design too, I can't recall. Then we came back during lunch and Mr. Curran showed us "The Toy", his electric metal cutting shears. (If you take a look at ~josborn/Sysop/credits, that's what "The Toy" refers to...while I'm at it, I tried to put a credits file together like they used to have on binx/goober before, it was closed to finished but not quite, you may want to adopt it, add things, delete things, or not use it at all, but it's there). We cut a square out of Silver Arrow's case, and then bolted the polycarbonate in there. We probably could've made it prettier, but we didn't have the materials or the time. That's the story. Justin -- Justin Osborn "Empty are the musings University of Maryland And wasted are the days Class of '05 You said you were only waiting jdosborn@wam.umd.edu Famous last words" lunokhod.student.umd.edu -- Jars of Clay