SurlyJoe has been busy in his lab again putting some aircraft aluminium to good use, not to mention the odd can of beer! But, what on earth could he have possibly built with this crazy material?

Read his latest article and see for yourself...

Project Introduction

Having abolished TV from my house, The family relies on our library of movies and music we have accumulated over the years. This includes a couple hundred VHS cassettes and DVD's along with music CD's and a bunch of stuff that's been ripped to DivX/MP3 over the years.

Eventually the wife was lamenting she needed a DVD player to go with her 13" tv/vcr combo in the bedroom because she was sick of all the tapes, I mentioned a PC and she rolled her eyes and went on about the 5 or 6 we already have. As usual I went into the big sell of how great it would be to have all the media right there in the bedroom and on a TV friendly interface, She could do it all with a remote! That all sounded good, but what was it going to cost? I lied and said "same price as a DVD player!! Well, a good one.."

I had some of this crazy aircraft aluminum sandwich in the attic from -cib-waterboy's dad that I have been itching to use for something, It is super rigid and weighs almost nothing, so brushed aluminum would be the theme!

I just needed to make it look like the cute little EPIA's I had shown her for around $150. So, I had the metal, a slim DVD and a 250w PSU, a Duron 1100 and a Rage 128 AGP with the theatre chip and TV out.

The Motherboard

Obviously, my budget didn't include an EPIA, so I started looking around for an MATX board I could stick the old Duron in, and an AGP riser for a Rage128 theatre card I had when I came along the $70 MSI K7N2GM2-LSR with on board GF4 and TV-out.

I was all too eager to scrap the riser and get some GF4 in the process! A $40 Htatchi Deathstar 80 GB HD and I pretty much had everything and money for screws and beer! I grabbed an old ATX board and cut 3" off the bottom and started to size up the parts in the smallest stack I could make. 13" x 12" x 2.75" was gonna be my inside dimension