Now the real modding fun starts! I first cleaned up the dirty marks on
the case with Surgical Spirit – it’s not a solvent and so won’t melt
the plastic.

Then I took out my dremel-a-like and made the top floppy drive slot
bigger, removing part of the old speaker fitting on the rear of the
facia. I cut out most of the plastic with the dremel, but finished off
with a scalpel by hand, as the plastic is quite soft.

Now I can fit the slot-loading DVD drive behind, like so:

Note that for this picture I’ve removed the front face of the DVD
drive – handily this model has swappable front covers. If we look at
the rear of the cover we can see it uses some felt to keep dust out of
the drive, and noise in:

I plan to use a similar approach on the facia – sticking felt to the
rear of it, with a slot cut in the appropriate place. This should give
a neat and practical finish.

Turning to the LCD monitor, it couldn’t fit flush to the facia as the
screw points for the old tube were in the way. To fix this, I cut out
parts of them with a scalpel, like so:

Now I simply need to secure the monitor to the facia and it will be done – as we can see from the front:

Now that everything’s been made safe and transported home I could take it all apart, so here is a selection of pics from that:

The original design of the mac was very clean and rather cunning – the
‘analog’ board (that held all the electronics for the monitor) forms
one side of the machine, with the ‘digital’ board forming the bottom.
So although I won’t be putting my smaller Mini-ITX motherboard there, I
will be getting some stiff plastic in to replace them, to give
structural strength and allow me to mount things on them.

Happily there was a big warning sign attached to the side of the analog
board, which will make an excellent template for the replacement:

Right now the lounge is full of bits of mac and bits of PC kit, and I’m
having a bit of a think about how to put it all back together again!

Yes, it’s finally on the orange website,
the HTC Universal – aka the SPV M5000. Can’t wait to upgrade to it and
ditch the current p.o.s. phone I have… which, incidentally is the Sanyo s705 – very bad software, crashes, short battery life. Not a great introduction to 3G.