G4 Mirror Drive Door conversion to....... NOT A HACKAMAC !

[ALXAndy]

Wasn't in the mood for soldering tonight. I am exhausted tbh. Fastest full case mod I have ever done.

Any way, before I made it all permanent I decided to test the hardware. I connected up the board etc PSU, all works perfectly. That was a relief.

Fired up the HDD PSU and again no problems. Phew. Not only that but when I tested the board it did not even notice I did not have that great plastic lump plugged in at all (which I thought it would, hence why it still exists) so I think I am just going to de-pin all of the crap I don't want and just wire up the LED board and bridge off to the PLED on the case (the original white Apple one).

As a complete bonus I found something really cool out about the fan. I can not believe I never noticed it before tbh. It has a speed selector switch on it FFS. 1200 RPM,900 RPM and 600 RPM. At 1200 it was still far too noisy, but once switched to 600 it became virtually silent (you will never hear it from a foot away) and yet still wafted lots of cold air into the case.

That is a total result. It saves me jimmy rigging wires for 7v (which it would still be too noisy at, IMO and would mess up the LED button). However, the LEDs do switch off and they have a memory on them, so you don't need to do it each time you disconnect the power and power it back up (I tested that also).

So I literally don't need to do anything at all now. I don't need any more fans either, meaning the mess is pretty much 0.

Very happy. It's about time it finally stopped fighting me and gave me some positive vibes

I will highly likely bash out the soldering tomorrow, go home Monday for a week and then return with the SSD. Wait for a sunny day, have "one day of suck" wet sanding out the panels and buffing them, then sit back and relax and set up FreeNAS. It also gives me a chance to pull one of the 1tb drives out of the Xbox 1x that never got used.

The last 1tb will come from the other NAS once it has been transferred across.



Srsly, what a total spaz. How could I have not noticed that?!?!?!

 

[ALXAndy]

I figured I would do some wet sanding and buffing today. The front and top panels are not gloss so they just need a bath. The side panels were in bad shape, however, and needed the works. I figured cool, I will take out the anger by sanding and buffing loads. And it went very well.



I was very proud of myself, given that side had a huge great gouge in it. Took forever to sand out, but hey it came out. I started with 1200 wet, then to 2000 wet and then I usually go to 3000 wet. However, I didn't have any 3000 so I did two runs with Tcut metallic (note metallic, NEVER EVER use Tcut on plastic panels) and then PlastX. PlastX is the secret weapon here. Nothing else I have ever tried is fine enough to make plastic shine without any haze.

So I thought cool I will put the panel back on !. Then the crap started.



It won't stay closed because I forgot to fit the U hoops back to the solid metal panel. And, you can't just remove the panel again easily oh no, you have to take the motherboard out because there is a clip under it. So I took it out (the mobo) removed the clip, fitted the U hoops and then put it back together. Only I didn't realise the handle also needs to be bolted into the metal panel so I had to remove the board AGAIN and do it all again.

The mesh bits came.



So it is literally one more "Session of suck" and then I can do the soldering and get to work with the software.

 

[ALXAndy]

Session of suck, part two.







Sadly for me there is going to be a part 3. The sodding handles. They too need the same treatment, but are much much smaller (thank the lord).

I won't bother much with the bottom feet because they will be on carpet so will turn grey any way, but I will do the top ones.

 

[ALXAndy]

Top done.

 

[ALXAndy]

Done.









I installed FreeNAS last night. I had to remove the RAID card for now because you can't boot from it in JBOD so it was freezing at the drive detection bit. FreeNAS is on, but it wants a network cable plugged in to continue and that's a problem right now.

Might try and cobble something together later, but the hard bit is done.

 

[ALXAndy]

And they're off.



Sadly the only way I can get the DATA over here is WIFI, but that doesn't matter. I will just leave them to their own devices.