Puzzlebox 2.0 The Second Coming

The idea was to have the motherboard mounted on a plate attached to a column that connects the cube to the base. All of the cables for the PSU, drives and LCD would be routed down this tube, hiding them from sight. You can see the early stages of this below.

I made the motherboard mount using two pieces of red plexiglass and some regular motherboard spacers. Why two layers? If there was only one then the various cables would dangle everywhere and it would be difficult to hide them. With two layers, there is a small sandwich of air that I can tuck all the power and data cables into before feeding them down the vertical tube into the base.

Pictured is an early test setup using a mini-ITX board - my m-ATX board was still in the mail. At this point, I hadn't found my final tube for the column yet. To get an idea of how things were fitting together, I used the one of the tubes from my NoIdpad mousemats as a placeholder. This tube had the right length and diameter and worked perfectly as a test.

Happy that I had the theory right, it was on to the difficult task of finding a suitable tube. The solution came from the most unlikely place: a stainless steel garden lamp at the local supermarket that was almost as if they had designed it for this purpose. This is often the case: Orac³ made the common shower hose infamous and the tubing on WMD is common handrailing. I love it when you can "repurpose" items for case modding.

Anywho, I quickly disassembled the lamp and threw out what I didn’t need. In this picture you can see the lamp in pieces, as well as a fan duct (shown in black) from an old case I had sitting around. The duct fit perfectly over the pipe.

Next, I had to cut a hole in the aluminum plate at the bottom of the base. A little tip: when cutting metal, it's always a good idea to mask up your piece first using tape. This not only prevents scratching, but also gives your cutting tool something to grip on - the last thing you want is it skidding across the surface!

Chop, chop! And we're done...