Cases for ATX power supplies.

aka

Swanking your jank

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Working hard in the lab, the corset post and exploring the world with the family have distracted me from posting the project I have completed.  While I don’t apologize for my priorities, I do make an apology to those who have been checking in.

Not only did I finish the case for the ATX Power supply for myself, but I built a second for a good friend who is a fabulous tinker himself.

The wooden part of the cases themselves are simple wood working – plywood with the edges covered in oak veneers.  I used luan was used for the grills, hand cut with a coping saw.  While unfettered ventilation is important, but not wanting to sacrifice aesthetic, I brass painted some window screen and glued it behind the grill to help obscure internal components.  The mark II has a black painted baffle halfway between the grill and the internal components to further aid this concealment. Wood stain and tongue oil help to give the wood parts a quality look.

Brass corners a dress up the edges of the vertical unit.  Some sheet tin is sufficient to mount the power supply in the rear on the unit.  I used some tin ceiling scraps for one and flashing scrap for the other.  Screw holes for mounting are best made with a nail punch, instead of a drill, because the flanges re-enforce  the holes a bit.

The name plate, terminal plates and switch plate were electro-etched using the power supplies themselves.  If one looks closely at the horizontal unit, it can be observed that the terminal plates and switch plate and switch plate are in negative image.  Mistakes do happen when one is in a hurry!  This is my lab power supple, and being dyslexic, I thought I would leave them this way to help me remember to check the orientation of my etching resistor transfer in the future.

All tubes and coils were made for the project.  Painted window screen, plastic from water bottles, construction paper, old phone wire, thin sheet copper, painted steel wool and metallic tape were key components in this process. Each is internally lit with an LED, in series with a resistor power by the un-used 5 volt capacity of the ATX unit. Simple and effective LED tools can be found at http://led.linear1.org/1led.wiz to help with resistor value selection.  My favorite tubes were not the ones I tried to made like vacuum tubes, but the ones where I got creative and just did my thing.

More pictures of this project can be found here.

This is a contenuation of the:

Converting an ATX computer power supply to a 12 volt DC Power source