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Tonkputer by Nev@Lehmä

Author: Lassi Niemistö
Published: 25th August 2005

Motherboard tray

The rear ATX backplate, with all the PCI slots in it, would be quite hard to make myself from scratch, so I bought one from a friend of mine for just 2€. THowever, I did make the rest of the tray myself using 3mm sheet aluminium. Apologies for the poor picture quality - I was forced to use my webcam for a few days.



Due to the lack of straight walls I had to modify the motherboard tray backpanel a little. I decided to make an "adapter", which mounts the backpanel to the curved side of the barrel. So I donned the safety glasses again and turned the circular saw on...



I drilled some holes into my new adapter to make it mountable to the barrel and curved it. I also tapped some M6 threads for mounting bolts with my very expensive Völkel thread tools. It was an easy job because I used some dishwashing liquid and water as lubricant. Sorry again about the poor pictures.



I used the Dremel cut-off wheel to make slits on the backside of the adapter plate to make bending the middle parts of the adapter into the barrel easier. When the middle parts - which will be used to mount the mobo tray to the adapter - were in their correct positions, I cut them to size and drilled holes for pop rivets. After that I sanded and polished whole thing to make it Tonkputer Style.

I mounted the adapter to the mobo tray with a couple of rivets - you can see the concept best in the photo on the right: the rectangular ATX backplate and the curved adapter to mount it to the curve of the milk churn. I also folded a hard disk mounting bracket from 1mm aluminium plate and mounted it to the back of the motherboard tray.



At this moment I had to test if the parts fitted together or not. Luckily there were no major complications - the only problem was that the threads weren't always exactly in the mid-point of the hole. I'm glad I decided to use hex bolts instead of ordinary screws - it wasn't a problem to just tighten the bolt with greater force to overcome the hiccup with the threading.

On the right you can see the 50 painstakingly tapped threads for the window retaining bolts.



The hex bolts seemed to find their threads. The appearance of the case was beginning to take shape.



The view inside from the top looks like this. You can see the cavity behind the motherboard tray - this is where the hard drive is hidden from view. I disassembled the motherboard tray and sanded the parts. Then I cleaned them with toluene and painted them with Maston white spray. It is worth spending an extra few minutes with the cleaning, because the paint adhered to the metal well, and the finished tray looked great.

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