The Powerhouse: A Transformative Build Project

As I sat down to embark on this build project, I knew that it wouldn't be an easy task. The laptop's original power switch was damaged, and I had to find a creative solution to replace it. After using my multimeter to determine the location of the replacement wires, I removed the existing ribbon cable and soldered the new power button wires directly onto it. This simple yet effective modification ensured that the power switch functioned as intended.

However, this was just the beginning of the project's challenges. The original power input jack was too short to reach its desired mounting position, so I had to fabricate a new one. After designing and 3D printing the necessary parts, I mounted the new jack onto a small block alongside the replacement analog audio socket. These components were then glued together and attached to the platform between the gap in the aluminum casing.

With the power input jack sorted, my attention turned to the cooling system. Passive cooling had proven insufficient, and I needed to add some form of active cooling to keep temperatures under control. The existing fan on the heatsink was large and ugly, so I decided to mount a smaller one that would blow cool air through the heatsink blades from below. To do this, I first chopped off the connector and soldered the sense wire to the original fan socket, ensuring that the motherboard could detect the presence of the new fan.

The remaining two power wires were then hooked up to a five-volt power source on the motherboard using some conveniently placed pads on an old SATA slimline adapter. This voltage was deliberately chosen to be lower than the 12 volts that the fan was designed for, resulting in a much slower spin speed and reducing noise levels to almost imperceptible. To further isolate the fan from vibrations, I created little aluminum L-brackets and stuck some sponge to them, which were then glued to the fan. This ingenious design ensured that the hum associated with direct contact was eliminated.

Next, I made a plastic shroud to direct airflow through the heatsink fins, using salvaged Wi-Fi antennas from an old screen. These components were glued into place within the front panel, and screws threaded into the aluminum angle at the bottom of the case. The top screws, meanwhile, threaded into the wooden bottom panel.

Finally, I turned my attention to finishing off the project with some decorative touches. To create a cover for the fan and its shroud, I fashioned a new piece of aluminum and scored some strong grooves in it before bending it at 90 degrees to create a smooth edge. Using fine-grit sandpaper, I flattened out any scratches and applied several coats of finishing oil to the veneer, carefully choosing only the darker wood for this treatment.

With the protective film removed, my build was complete. The finished product looked like a piece of art, with its unique blend of natural materials and glossy finishes. While I had used veneer in this project, I encouraged readers not to be limited by traditional choices – leather, vinyl wrap, or even printed paper could be used instead, allowing for a truly creative outlet.

If you're inspired to try building one of these PCs yourself, don't forget to send me your creations on Twitter at @DRIperks! And if you're new to the channel, be sure to subscribe and look forward to our next project – goodbye for now.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enOh balance rate this is the result of today's project which is all about taking damaged laptops and converting them into beautiful desktop media PCs it's great for the environment great for your pocket and great fun let's get to it from all angles this combination of wood and aluminium looks really striking and it's very unique for a computer some of its design elements are actually a result of its internal workings for example the finned aluminium on the side is actually a heatsink for the processor and the brushed aluminium below it houses a fan that gently circulates the air keeping a call as this fan has been soft mounted and spins slowly the PC is silent which makes it a pleasure to use whether you're watching YouTube videos or browsing the web I have mine plugged into the lounge TV and in combination with a wireless keyboard that has a built-in crack pad it is comfortable to use from the sofa and results in an experience as good as any expensive Smart TV for a fraction of the cost so before we get going with feed build I'm happy to say that this video has been sponsored by dashlane which is a free and premium service for managing all of your online passwords now if you have heard the official advice you'll know that we're supposed to use you need two passwords for all of the online accounts and services that we use but we all know how difficult that is to keep and that's where dashlane comes into its own because it can store manage and even generate all these different passwords for you so you don't have to keep on remembering and entering them yourself now a super secure because it's all encrypted and it works across all major platforms like Mac Windows iOS and Android and if your device has a fingerprint sensor it can utilize that as well which is my personal favorite feature as it makes it super fast to use so sign up for free using the link in the description which will add all the premium features to your account for one month now you can keep using the free version for as long as you like but if you did enjoy the premium features you can find a 10% discount code for it in the description now I've actually installed it on the media PC which will be super handy so I don't have to enter any passwords speaking of which we can begin building now as I mentioned earlier this project is perfect for giving new life to laptops that function fine internally but have some kind of external defects like a smash screen or perhaps a non-working keyboard my laptop costs just 12 pounds which is about 15 dollars and is powerful enough for everyday use as it has an Intel i3 processor and plenty of RAM the first thing to do is begin disassembly so that we can remove the internal components from the plastic casing generally laptops are held together by lots of screws on the bottom which all need to be undone the exact process for this will vary from laptop to laptop so I won't go into too much detail here but generally you can just model through it to get it all undone as it doesn't need to be put back together afterwards sometimes the screws aren't that obvious and may even be underneath stickers and around the back my laptop required the panel above the keyboard to be removed followed by the keyboard itself before I could access the remaining screws that were holding the chassis together now that we're in we can see the motherboard which can be carefully lifted out and at this point it's important to give it a test to make sure that it still works properly the power button for mine is on a separate little board so after removing this and clipping it back into the motherboard a monitor can be plugged in as well as the data drive and a power adapter will it work yep the hard drive and fan spin off and it soon boots into Windows one thing I did notice though is that the stupid little fan on this is annoyingly loud and whine as we're supposed to be building a media PC having such a racket isn't an option so we need to do something about it thankfully the cooling unit is easy to remove by undoing a few screws it could come in handy for a future product of some kind so I'm going to save mine for such a time just in case the processor still needs to be cooled however so I'm going to add a much bigger heatsink from an older desktop PC I found this one in my parts bin and it's absolutely huge compared to the original cooler now it does have a fan on it but ideally I'd like the media PC to be silent so I'm going to try removing it to see whether the cooler is capable of keeping the processor in check passively as the heatsink is so much bigger than the one is replacing after adding a little bit more thermal grease to the processor to aid heat transfer I balanced the heatsink on top and then booted up the system except for it didn't the lights were on and the hard drive was spinning but nothing was appearing on screen almost as if it was dead had been pretty careful though so I wasn't panicking too much and it actually turned out to be simply because the fan wasn't plugged in which halted the buta process this is putting my plans of passive cooling in jeopardy but will carry on and sort out later so to test it out I launched a program called prime95 which puts the processor under an intense artificial load to stress it as far as it will go temperatures steadily climbed over about 20 minutes and eventually hit a ceiling at around 80 degrees Celsius occasionally it would bump up to 85 degrees which would trigger thermal throttling which dropped the temperature back down again so while the system was completely stable and thanks to the thermal throttling would never properly overheat these temperatures are higher than ideal so it may not be worth going the passive route after all for now anyway the heatsink can have a few holes drilled into it so that it can be mounted securely to the motherboard from the back using four screws now as the chipset next to it also gets quite warm I used some thermally conductive glue to attach a small heatsink to it to keep it nice and cool so with that done it's time to get going with the rest of the build and the first thing we can tackle is the mounting platform for the motherboard for this we'll need some aluminium cheating that's about 1.5 millimeters thick onto which the perimeter of the motherboard can be marked with a knife these grooves can then be deepened so that the Arminian can be bent along them repeatedly until it breaks free optionally you may want to follow any gaps around the outside of the motherboard as these can be handy for making space for internal wood supports or components as you'll see later we can now make various holes in this sheet corresponding to a few of the motherboard mounting holes any extra components need to be catered for here as well like the data drives I got the correct positioning for these by breaking through a piece of paper and then marking their locations on the aluminium using a sharp point any burrs that are left behind by all this drilling by the way can be taken care of by twisting a large drill bit over the holes by hand like so once all of the holes have been created any protective film needs to be peeled off and the whole thing given a wash with water to remove any aluminium particles and it wouldn't be very good for these to come into contact with the electronics so the first components to mount are the data drives the original laptop used a hard disk drive but this was a major bottleneck for its performance so I'm going to replace it with a solid-state drive which has no moving parts so helps the computer burn significantly more smoothly it can't hold as much data is a typical hard drive can though so for additional storage I'm going to mount a secondary hard drive that has a huge capacity in comparison so with these secured in place it's time to add some PCB standoff pillars for later mounting the motherboard mine are 15 millimeters high so we're just long enough to hold the motherboard above the hard drives without touching before screwing the board in place though we need to plug in all of the cables that attach to its underside as we won't be able to access this area later here I've attached the power button wire and Bluetooth module another consideration is the audio socket as I'm planning on passing the audio through to a television using an HDMI cable it doesn't matter too much but I'd still like to have the option of using the analogue audio output should I need it unfortunately the side of the motherboard that they're on will later beat the top of the case and I don't want any visible ports there so I need to root them out where I did this by soldering a headphone socket to a length of shielded audio cable and then soldered the other end to the appropriate pads underneath the audio output port which I discovered by using a multimeter on beeper mode one of the pads needs to be connected to ground as it is a sense connection that tells the computer whether something is plugged in or not with it connected to ground permanently the PC will always assume that something is there to send the audio signal to right so now some SATA extension cables can be plugged into the date drives and the motherboard screwed in place the SATA cable for the main solid state drive happily plugs into the original port but the one for the secondary storage doesn't fit at all what's going on here well the secondary port on the motherboard is a SATA port but it's designed for use with an optical drive rather than a hard drive and uses what's called SATA slimline the data connection for this is identical to a full-sized port but the power side is slightly trimmed down to take up less space you can buy little cables to convert it to full-size or wire one or yourself but I had a little optical beta to the hard drive adapter so I pried it apart to get the connector out which allowed it to be hooked up without any force so with that the motherboard and components are successfully grouped together into a nice solid platform and we can begin working on what will become the visible part of the case so this we can cut two matching panels out of some kind of wood I'm using MDF as it's cheap and easy to work with to make the curve on the top front corner I use a compass to market out and then cut along it with a coping saw smoothing it off with a sanding stick the components need to be mounted onto one of these panels so the mounting hole positions can be marked with a pencil I added these mounting holes to the aluminium sheet earlier and there are three of them which is all it takes to hold its securely in place I used some short screws for this so that they wouldn't go through to the other side and added some washers to hold it slightly off the surface allowing room for the heads of the other screws with the other panel I could have a rectangle so it could fit over the heatsink and help this stand proud against the back panel I added a couple of wooden battens holding them in place with glue and countersunk screws this being MDF it is a very boring material to look at and it definitely needs to be spruced up so to do this I'm going to use some veneer which is real hardwood sliced into extremely thin pieces as some veneer shrinks when it's first applied give it an iron first just to free shrink it now the panel and veneer sheets can have at least two coats of wood glue applied to them you may need to add a tiny amount of water so that it spreads more easily and once it's thoroughly dried the pieces can be trimmed down to size and a hot iron used to press it firmly in place which slightly melts the glue and sticks the two pieces very strongly together make sure that your iron doesn't have any water in it by the way as we don't want steam puffing all over the place once all of the bits have been added they can be trimmed down along the edges and then sanded smooth with fine grit sandpaper as you can see this is starting to look really nice and I did a similar job to the back panel as well this time going with a more natural edge that follows the grain of the wood rather than a straight line the next thing to do is could have a piece of wood to act as the base this piece is actually going to be one of the two anchor points that holds the front panel in place so I've screwed on a piece of angled aluminium to act like a big bracket after which the wood piece can be glued to the front panel the aluminium angle by the way needs to have two threaded holes made in it to allow screws to lock into place for mounting purposes later so every good computer needs a power button to add one here we can simply drill a hole for it and lock it in place over not this of course needs to be hooked up to the power switch on the laptop so I used my multimeter to find out where to attach it to turns out that it's simply two of the lanes on this ribbon cable so I removed it and soldered the power button wires directly to it another thing I needed to do was replace the power input Jack as the original wasn't long enough to reach where I wanted to mount it I actually mounted this new one onto a small block along with the replacement analog audio socket which then got glued to the platform in between the gap I made in the aluminium right at the start see I told you it has come in useful so now there's one last thing to sort out before the case can be closed up and that's what to do about the cooling as you saw earlier passive cooling temperatures were really a bit too high to be considered comfortable so some kind of fan does still need to be added now the fan that was on the heatsink at the start was large and ugly so instead I decided to mount a small one that could blow cool air open towards and through the heatsink blades from below so the first thing to do is chop off the connector and solder the sense wire to the original fan socket which should take care of the requirement for the motherboard to sense that a fan is present before allowing the system to boot the remaining two wires which are power wires can now be hooked up to a five volt power source on the motherboard I had to look at the pin configuration of a SATA connection online and soldered the wires to some conveniently placed pads on the SATA slimline adapter I salvaged earlier which will deliver five volts to the fan whenever the system is powered up this voltage by the way is far lower than the 12 volts that the famil is designed for which is intentional as it means that the fan spins much more slowly making it literally silent unless your areas about 10 centimeters away from it at these speeds though vibration noise becomes the most apparent sound meaning that if the fan touches something solid like the panel you can hear a slight hum so to isolate it from the surface I made some little aluminium L brackets and stuck some sponge to them which in turn were glued to the fan this does a fantastic job at isolating the hum and is much much quieter than direct hard contact once the l-brackets were glued in place I made a little plastic shroud to direct the airflow through the heatsinks fins so after salvaging the Wi-Fi antennas from the screen and gluing them to the inside the front panel can be screwed in place the bottom screws thread into the aluminum angle that was a d'azyr Lea and the top ones thread into the wooden bottom so the build is almost complete now but there are a couple of things left to finish off the first of these is to bend a piece of aluminium to fit over the front and top gluing it in place to the front panel using some epoxy as it's only stuck to the front panel it allows the front panel to be removable which is important for any PC for maintenance purposes now to make a cover for the fan and its shroud we can get another piece of aluminium and score some strong grooves in it and tightly bend it at 90 degrees as this makes an ugly corner we can now take a file and flatten it out like so to remove any scratches we can now take a piece of very fine grit sandpaper and run it along in one direction which gives it a lovely brushed appearance now it can simply be glued in place the back of the case where all of the ports are is left open to allow air to be taken in at the bottom and vented out through the heatsink sometime I plan on adding a fine mesh to this bow to improve it visually the very last thing to do is add several coats of finishing oil to some of the veneer I've chosen to added only to the darker wood as I'd like to have a contrast between the soft natural oak and the deep rich gloss of the darker wood and with that the protective film can be peeled away or ballad spread so that's it for this video I'm personally really happy with how this one's turned out because it looks like a piece of art as well as a functioning PT and there's a great use of an old laptop now if you make one of these yourself don't forget that you don't have to use veneer you could use something like leather or vinyl wrap or even you could print something on glossy paper and use that instead you know go wild it can be a really good creative outlet and you'll have something unique at the end of it now if you do make one of these don't forget to send me a picture to my Twitter account at DRI perks but other than that if you're new to the channel don't forget to subscribe and I hope we'll see you next time good bye for nowOh balance rate this is the result of today's project which is all about taking damaged laptops and converting them into beautiful desktop media PCs it's great for the environment great for your pocket and great fun let's get to it from all angles this combination of wood and aluminium looks really striking and it's very unique for a computer some of its design elements are actually a result of its internal workings for example the finned aluminium on the side is actually a heatsink for the processor and the brushed aluminium below it houses a fan that gently circulates the air keeping a call as this fan has been soft mounted and spins slowly the PC is silent which makes it a pleasure to use whether you're watching YouTube videos or browsing the web I have mine plugged into the lounge TV and in combination with a wireless keyboard that has a built-in crack pad it is comfortable to use from the sofa and results in an experience as good as any expensive Smart TV for a fraction of the cost so before we get going with feed build I'm happy to say that this video has been sponsored by dashlane which is a free and premium service for managing all of your online passwords now if you have heard the official advice you'll know that we're supposed to use you need two passwords for all of the online accounts and services that we use but we all know how difficult that is to keep and that's where dashlane comes into its own because it can store manage and even generate all these different passwords for you so you don't have to keep on remembering and entering them yourself now a super secure because it's all encrypted and it works across all major platforms like Mac Windows iOS and Android and if your device has a fingerprint sensor it can utilize that as well which is my personal favorite feature as it makes it super fast to use so sign up for free using the link in the description which will add all the premium features to your account for one month now you can keep using the free version for as long as you like but if you did enjoy the premium features you can find a 10% discount code for it in the description now I've actually installed it on the media PC which will be super handy so I don't have to enter any passwords speaking of which we can begin building now as I mentioned earlier this project is perfect for giving new life to laptops that function fine internally but have some kind of external defects like a smash screen or perhaps a non-working keyboard my laptop costs just 12 pounds which is about 15 dollars and is powerful enough for everyday use as it has an Intel i3 processor and plenty of RAM the first thing to do is begin disassembly so that we can remove the internal components from the plastic casing generally laptops are held together by lots of screws on the bottom which all need to be undone the exact process for this will vary from laptop to laptop so I won't go into too much detail here but generally you can just model through it to get it all undone as it doesn't need to be put back together afterwards sometimes the screws aren't that obvious and may even be underneath stickers and around the back my laptop required the panel above the keyboard to be removed followed by the keyboard itself before I could access the remaining screws that were holding the chassis together now that we're in we can see the motherboard which can be carefully lifted out and at this point it's important to give it a test to make sure that it still works properly the power button for mine is on a separate little board so after removing this and clipping it back into the motherboard a monitor can be plugged in as well as the data drive and a power adapter will it work yep the hard drive and fan spin off and it soon boots into Windows one thing I did notice though is that the stupid little fan on this is annoyingly loud and whine as we're supposed to be building a media PC having such a racket isn't an option so we need to do something about it thankfully the cooling unit is easy to remove by undoing a few screws it could come in handy for a future product of some kind so I'm going to save mine for such a time just in case the processor still needs to be cooled however so I'm going to add a much bigger heatsink from an older desktop PC I found this one in my parts bin and it's absolutely huge compared to the original cooler now it does have a fan on it but ideally I'd like the media PC to be silent so I'm going to try removing it to see whether the cooler is capable of keeping the processor in check passively as the heatsink is so much bigger than the one is replacing after adding a little bit more thermal grease to the processor to aid heat transfer I balanced the heatsink on top and then booted up the system except for it didn't the lights were on and the hard drive was spinning but nothing was appearing on screen almost as if it was dead had been pretty careful though so I wasn't panicking too much and it actually turned out to be simply because the fan wasn't plugged in which halted the buta process this is putting my plans of passive cooling in jeopardy but will carry on and sort out later so to test it out I launched a program called prime95 which puts the processor under an intense artificial load to stress it as far as it will go temperatures steadily climbed over about 20 minutes and eventually hit a ceiling at around 80 degrees Celsius occasionally it would bump up to 85 degrees which would trigger thermal throttling which dropped the temperature back down again so while the system was completely stable and thanks to the thermal throttling would never properly overheat these temperatures are higher than ideal so it may not be worth going the passive route after all for now anyway the heatsink can have a few holes drilled into it so that it can be mounted securely to the motherboard from the back using four screws now as the chipset next to it also gets quite warm I used some thermally conductive glue to attach a small heatsink to it to keep it nice and cool so with that done it's time to get going with the rest of the build and the first thing we can tackle is the mounting platform for the motherboard for this we'll need some aluminium cheating that's about 1.5 millimeters thick onto which the perimeter of the motherboard can be marked with a knife these grooves can then be deepened so that the Arminian can be bent along them repeatedly until it breaks free optionally you may want to follow any gaps around the outside of the motherboard as these can be handy for making space for internal wood supports or components as you'll see later we can now make various holes in this sheet corresponding to a few of the motherboard mounting holes any extra components need to be catered for here as well like the data drives I got the correct positioning for these by breaking through a piece of paper and then marking their locations on the aluminium using a sharp point any burrs that are left behind by all this drilling by the way can be taken care of by twisting a large drill bit over the holes by hand like so once all of the holes have been created any protective film needs to be peeled off and the whole thing given a wash with water to remove any aluminium particles and it wouldn't be very good for these to come into contact with the electronics so the first components to mount are the data drives the original laptop used a hard disk drive but this was a major bottleneck for its performance so I'm going to replace it with a solid-state drive which has no moving parts so helps the computer burn significantly more smoothly it can't hold as much data is a typical hard drive can though so for additional storage I'm going to mount a secondary hard drive that has a huge capacity in comparison so with these secured in place it's time to add some PCB standoff pillars for later mounting the motherboard mine are 15 millimeters high so we're just long enough to hold the motherboard above the hard drives without touching before screwing the board in place though we need to plug in all of the cables that attach to its underside as we won't be able to access this area later here I've attached the power button wire and Bluetooth module another consideration is the audio socket as I'm planning on passing the audio through to a television using an HDMI cable it doesn't matter too much but I'd still like to have the option of using the analogue audio output should I need it unfortunately the side of the motherboard that they're on will later beat the top of the case and I don't want any visible ports there so I need to root them out where I did this by soldering a headphone socket to a length of shielded audio cable and then soldered the other end to the appropriate pads underneath the audio output port which I discovered by using a multimeter on beeper mode one of the pads needs to be connected to ground as it is a sense connection that tells the computer whether something is plugged in or not with it connected to ground permanently the PC will always assume that something is there to send the audio signal to right so now some SATA extension cables can be plugged into the date drives and the motherboard screwed in place the SATA cable for the main solid state drive happily plugs into the original port but the one for the secondary storage doesn't fit at all what's going on here well the secondary port on the motherboard is a SATA port but it's designed for use with an optical drive rather than a hard drive and uses what's called SATA slimline the data connection for this is identical to a full-sized port but the power side is slightly trimmed down to take up less space you can buy little cables to convert it to full-size or wire one or yourself but I had a little optical beta to the hard drive adapter so I pried it apart to get the connector out which allowed it to be hooked up without any force so with that the motherboard and components are successfully grouped together into a nice solid platform and we can begin working on what will become the visible part of the case so this we can cut two matching panels out of some kind of wood I'm using MDF as it's cheap and easy to work with to make the curve on the top front corner I use a compass to market out and then cut along it with a coping saw smoothing it off with a sanding stick the components need to be mounted onto one of these panels so the mounting hole positions can be marked with a pencil I added these mounting holes to the aluminium sheet earlier and there are three of them which is all it takes to hold its securely in place I used some short screws for this so that they wouldn't go through to the other side and added some washers to hold it slightly off the surface allowing room for the heads of the other screws with the other panel I could have a rectangle so it could fit over the heatsink and help this stand proud against the back panel I added a couple of wooden battens holding them in place with glue and countersunk screws this being MDF it is a very boring material to look at and it definitely needs to be spruced up so to do this I'm going to use some veneer which is real hardwood sliced into extremely thin pieces as some veneer shrinks when it's first applied give it an iron first just to free shrink it now the panel and veneer sheets can have at least two coats of wood glue applied to them you may need to add a tiny amount of water so that it spreads more easily and once it's thoroughly dried the pieces can be trimmed down to size and a hot iron used to press it firmly in place which slightly melts the glue and sticks the two pieces very strongly together make sure that your iron doesn't have any water in it by the way as we don't want steam puffing all over the place once all of the bits have been added they can be trimmed down along the edges and then sanded smooth with fine grit sandpaper as you can see this is starting to look really nice and I did a similar job to the back panel as well this time going with a more natural edge that follows the grain of the wood rather than a straight line the next thing to do is could have a piece of wood to act as the base this piece is actually going to be one of the two anchor points that holds the front panel in place so I've screwed on a piece of angled aluminium to act like a big bracket after which the wood piece can be glued to the front panel the aluminium angle by the way needs to have two threaded holes made in it to allow screws to lock into place for mounting purposes later so every good computer needs a power button to add one here we can simply drill a hole for it and lock it in place over not this of course needs to be hooked up to the power switch on the laptop so I used my multimeter to find out where to attach it to turns out that it's simply two of the lanes on this ribbon cable so I removed it and soldered the power button wires directly to it another thing I needed to do was replace the power input Jack as the original wasn't long enough to reach where I wanted to mount it I actually mounted this new one onto a small block along with the replacement analog audio socket which then got glued to the platform in between the gap I made in the aluminium right at the start see I told you it has come in useful so now there's one last thing to sort out before the case can be closed up and that's what to do about the cooling as you saw earlier passive cooling temperatures were really a bit too high to be considered comfortable so some kind of fan does still need to be added now the fan that was on the heatsink at the start was large and ugly so instead I decided to mount a small one that could blow cool air open towards and through the heatsink blades from below so the first thing to do is chop off the connector and solder the sense wire to the original fan socket which should take care of the requirement for the motherboard to sense that a fan is present before allowing the system to boot the remaining two wires which are power wires can now be hooked up to a five volt power source on the motherboard I had to look at the pin configuration of a SATA connection online and soldered the wires to some conveniently placed pads on the SATA slimline adapter I salvaged earlier which will deliver five volts to the fan whenever the system is powered up this voltage by the way is far lower than the 12 volts that the famil is designed for which is intentional as it means that the fan spins much more slowly making it literally silent unless your areas about 10 centimeters away from it at these speeds though vibration noise becomes the most apparent sound meaning that if the fan touches something solid like the panel you can hear a slight hum so to isolate it from the surface I made some little aluminium L brackets and stuck some sponge to them which in turn were glued to the fan this does a fantastic job at isolating the hum and is much much quieter than direct hard contact once the l-brackets were glued in place I made a little plastic shroud to direct the airflow through the heatsinks fins so after salvaging the Wi-Fi antennas from the screen and gluing them to the inside the front panel can be screwed in place the bottom screws thread into the aluminum angle that was a d'azyr Lea and the top ones thread into the wooden bottom so the build is almost complete now but there are a couple of things left to finish off the first of these is to bend a piece of aluminium to fit over the front and top gluing it in place to the front panel using some epoxy as it's only stuck to the front panel it allows the front panel to be removable which is important for any PC for maintenance purposes now to make a cover for the fan and its shroud we can get another piece of aluminium and score some strong grooves in it and tightly bend it at 90 degrees as this makes an ugly corner we can now take a file and flatten it out like so to remove any scratches we can now take a piece of very fine grit sandpaper and run it along in one direction which gives it a lovely brushed appearance now it can simply be glued in place the back of the case where all of the ports are is left open to allow air to be taken in at the bottom and vented out through the heatsink sometime I plan on adding a fine mesh to this bow to improve it visually the very last thing to do is add several coats of finishing oil to some of the veneer I've chosen to added only to the darker wood as I'd like to have a contrast between the soft natural oak and the deep rich gloss of the darker wood and with that the protective film can be peeled away or ballad spread so that's it for this video I'm personally really happy with how this one's turned out because it looks like a piece of art as well as a functioning PT and there's a great use of an old laptop now if you make one of these yourself don't forget that you don't have to use veneer you could use something like leather or vinyl wrap or even you could print something on glossy paper and use that instead you know go wild it can be a really good creative outlet and you'll have something unique at the end of it now if you do make one of these don't forget to send me a picture to my Twitter account at DRI perks but other than that if you're new to the channel don't forget to subscribe and I hope we'll see you next time good bye for now\n"