I've told this story before.
Through the earlier part of this decade, I was recycling older, full-tower cases that had come with Gateway 2000 machines from the early and mid-90's. One of them was an AT-EISA case for a 486 system; another was an early ATX that came with a Pentium-100.
Then I moved back to my home-town, and my family, who'd all bought Gateway full-towers in the 90's, wanted upgrades. Fun and games for the retiree with a tool-collection.
I made friends with an owner of a hole-in-the-wall computer store downtown. He was also a musician, playing in a Chinese disco at night. His store had a pile of cyber-junk in the room behind the store-front; his desk was piled high with all sorts of screws, wires, plugs, circuit-boards -- you name it. Even the store-front had a wall lined with computer-case discards. I was building ducts from fan-frames, and I also was generating a lot of cyber-junk for discard.
I'd take this cyber-junk to the county landfill, but it's a 30-mile drive round-trip, and what started as a $5 fee for dumping has increased to $8. But my friend down the hill is barely two miles away. He does a rear-door business recycling all the cyber-junk to salvage the rare-metals, and he's under an environmental regulation mandate, anyway. We developed a symbiotic relationship where I'd give him my cyber-junk, saving the gasoline, time and trouble, and he'd give me things . . . . . like . . . . computer cases.
Since then, I've acquired a full-tower ATX In-Win and two ATX Gateway-full-towers produced by the OEM between 1997 and 1999. We've used them for P4 upgrades; modded them for 120mm front and rear fans. Visiting my cousin in Tacoma, WA, who also has a five-machine home-office network I'd maintain for him, he wanted to dump some of his own cyber-junk, and I accompanied him to a large warehouse on Federal Way -- not more than a mile or so from the location of
www.infotechnow.com -- run and staffed by an extended family of Asian-Americans. We discovered this huge pile of empty cases there, and you'd become fatigued going from one end of the warehouse -- and the pile -- to the other. Since we dropped off a prodigious carload of hard-disks and other paraphernalia, I asked the owner if I could just "have a free case," and I got an affirmative nod. I found a twin for one of the Gateway full-towers we already had, so when I left the Tacoma-Seattle area, I had it tucked into my SUV cargo bay and brought it all the way back to So-Cal with me.
My latest build -- the "Chrome-Lightning" -- came from my friend's shop downtown. It's a 1994 Compaq ProLiant Business SErver case. Yes . . . . It's huge. I wanted it that way. I'm still contemplating the write-up for the case mod, and it incorporates parts from a '97 IBM ATX midtower and a '99 Dell midtower. The motherboard pan had proprietary AT-era standoff locations, but read on here.
Twice a year, the county accepts cyber-junk at a less remote location, and I was down there dropping off . . . . more cyber-junk two months ago. I discovered MOUNTAINS of computer discards -- all the cases in perfect condition. It would seem that you could find any case specification you wanted in such a pile, and just get permission to walk off with it.
How's that for a round-about provision of advice?
By the way -- per a need for ATX cases. I still regret junking my AT-EISA case. All you need to convert an AT case to an ATX case is a drill-bit and tap for 6-32 screws, and an old discarded ATX motherboard or cardboard template with the holes precisely punched for the ATX configuration. You see, going from ISA to AT standard in the '80s, and from AT to EISA in the early '90s -- then from those specs to PCI -- all the ISA, EISA, and PCI slots in those cases are inter-compatible. You can prove it to yourself with a junk ATX motherboard and graphics card: you can line up the expansion card slots, and everything will fit perfectly. This extends without exception to ATX boards with PCI-E slots.
And if the case has proprietary standoffs, or if it was designed for ISA/EISA-AT machines, just line up the junk-mobo-and-graphics-card, mark the holes carefully, drill them out, and tap the standoff screw-holes. IF you make a mistake, you can cut out a small egg-shaped piece of the sheet-metal so that the hole fits one of those sliding brass standoffs from old computer cases.
At Sears, the drill-bit and tap for 6-32 screws costs something like $5.
Case manufacturers may not be eager that I propagate these ideas, but I'm sure their cases will wind up in my hands after they've been used by someone else. Besides -- why cut up a $150 case with the risk of making mistakes, when you can cut up a piece of junk with a much higher probability of turning it into something useful?
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