OK, about those glass side panels.
The drive to retain as much of a stock look for the case as possible extends to keeping the same thumbscrews for the glass panels, so given I was replacing parts of the case which have panel mounts on them I needed to rebuild those mounts to fit the screws. Now although they're standard 6-32 threads, it took me a while to find brass standoffs that were 6-32 on
both sides; usually they're 6-32 male and M3 female. Also they needed to be about 5mm in diameter too in order to fit the rubber grommets and mate with the glass.
Turns out I shouldn't have bothered
Eventually found some, marked up the new holes, tapped them into place and then realised they were too long. Not a problem, I'll just cut them down to fit, but then I realised a major error in judgement. Firstly, by chopping down the standoffs, there was very little female thread left to screw into, so there was no way the tempered glass could be supported safely even if the thumbscrews could actually go in. Then I realised that In Win had used through hole self-clinching threaded standoffs. This is how their thumbscrews would fully seat into the case and support the tempered glass.
So after carefully inspecting some of the original case parts, I tracked down the exact PEM fastener required, but the company in question no longer dealt with private customers, and I couldn't find any Chinese knockoffs (unlike my flush nuts). So I resolved this by doing something I didn't want to do: irreversibly cut up the original case
These particular standoffs fit into place by cold-forming sheet material into a little channel between its main body and a flange. As a result there's no welding or such required to get them in. So, by cutting into the aluminium either side of the standoff's main body, the material around it is actually no longer attached to anything. Gently pry it off and the standoff is released.
Since these things are steel pressed into aluminium, there's no deformation at all and can be re-used. So give them a quick sand down to remove the paint and get a proper through hole cut into my tabs (5.6mm in this instance). Then apply pressure.
And in they pop!
My half ton arbor press was sufficient for the pressure, but I had to use a chunky M8 spacer I had floating around as a makeshift anvil. Worked nicely though. Unfortunately I couldn't get the arbor press into position for the main body where we have this big B-shape series of folds. So I used my body weight instead; laying the fully folded, tapped and drilled final body work down onto a piece of MDF with a hole in it, putting a dome head screw into the backside of the standoff placing a couple sheets of material onto the screw head and then generating half a ton of pressure by balancing on one foot and doing squats is really, really not how I want to insert these things. There was this big pop and I did not know if the standoff had gone in or if I'd trashed the whole damn thing.
It was the former.
Beautifully stock.
) of the motherboard lighting ring, and if I can clear out the spare room/workshop/bombsite I can get my scroll saw set up to make the PSU mounting brackets (because cutting aluminium angle properly with a hack saw is apparently too much for me).