Into this: (click pics for larger version)
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I turned this:
Into this: (click pics for larger version)
Quicksilver PowerMac G4 733mhz, NVidia GeForce2 MX, 2 x Firewire 400.
| Original | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Colour | Silver | Black |
| Power LED | White | Blue |
| Lighting | None | Green |
| Optical Drive | CD-RW | DVD-ROM |
| RAM | 512mb | 1Gb |
| USB Ports (rear) | 2 x 1.0 Full Speed | Plus 2 x 2.0 Hi Speed |
| USB Ports (front) | None | 1 x 2.0 Hi Speed |
| Harddisc | 40Gb 5400rpm | 120Gb 7200rpm |
Additional USB ports provided by Belkin F5U219 PCI card.
This started when I acquired a Power Mac G4 733mhz Quicksilver. Inspired by an article I stumbled across about modified Macs I started thinking what I might be able to do to aforementioned Quicksilver. I decided I'd repaint it black and light up the Apple logo on either side green. I also thought front USB and Firewire ports would be useful. If you've ever examined the Power Mac G4 cases you'll know they're painted on the inside of the plastic. I was determined to do the same as it would mean the new paint is protected from getting scratched and because I knew I would probably make a complete mess of trying to do a decent paint job on the outside what with the need for sanding between layers and such. Painting the inside meant I had to remove the original paint first. Which turned out to be something of a pain to do. In addition to the outside cosmetic changes I also ended up cutting up some of the metal case to (theoretically at least) improve ventilation and cut down noise. The following is a somewhat haphazard attempt at documenting how I achieved this. I did this over a period of about two months. I wasn't in a hurry and it gave me time to spread bits of the project all over the house and lose things. The photos vary in quality as the only camera I have is in my phone and I got a new phone with a much better camera part way through. Some of them can be clicked on to see a larger version. There's not as many as I thought. I'm sure I took photos of some things but can't find them.
If you're going to attempt this yourself you have to be prepared to pretty much entirely dismantle the Mac. You do this at your own risk, don't moan to me if you break yours etc blah etc.
The first thing to do is to dismantle the case. I don't have detailed pictures of every step of this. You can figure it out as you go along. Just take it slow and have a good look at everything before you try and remove it. Labelling the screws will help a lot when you have to put it all back together.
The first part is to remove the handles. This is easy as they're just held on with hex head screws. Once you've removed the handles the top panel slides off easily if you push it towards the back of the case. To get the front and rear panels off you have to remove the side panels. Easy, just more hex head screws right? Wrong. Remove the hex head screws holding the panel on the side that does not open and you'll find it's still very firmly attached to the case. Open the case up and near the power supply you'll see a large black clip screwed to the case holding a bundle of wires.
Undo the screw holding the clip in place and remove the clip. Behind the bundle of wires you'll find the reason the side panel didn't just fall off when you removed the screws in the form of two plastic tabs sticking through holes in the case. You need to pop those tabs out to free the panel. This is easier said than done as they are very stiff. I used a small thin flat head screwdriver to pry them out one by one. Once you have that side panel off you can, with the case open, remove the front panel. That's just held on with some tabs on either side which are easily released by slipping a screwdriver in. You can get one of the back panels off now too, that's held on with some hex head screws and more tabs. The other panel you can't get off until you've removed the second side panel, it's also just held on with tabs.
The next part is a biggy, you have to remove the second side panel, the one on the side of the Mac which hinges down. Remember those clips that held on the other panel? Yep, this side has them too and they are a lot harder to get to. This is the point you have to remove the motherboard. I don't have any photos of this but if you take your time you'll be OK. First find somewhere safe to put the parts once you've removed them. I used a plastic storage box. The motherboard and other bits ended up staying in there for over three weeks in the end. You need to remove the PCI cards first, then the fan assembly next to the heatsink. Then you need to remove the heatsink from the CPU card (to get at the screws underneath), then remove the CPU card from the motherboard, and then finally remove the motherboard. Label the screws as you take them out, save yourself some guessing and experimentation later. Once all the electronic bits are out the second side panel can be removed. Once both side panels were off I cut off the tabs that made removing them from the case so difficult. They're not needed to hold the panels on, the screws do that just fine. With lights going inside there it's important to be able to remove the panels easily for maintenance and experimentation.
OK, next step is to get rid of the paint. For this you need a lot of patience and something called Isopropyl Alcohol. From what I've read on various mod sites it seems that in the US this stuff is as common as lemonade and not that much more expensive. If you live the UK, as I do, it's as common as... something you hardly ever see and not so cheap. Best source I found is here. Get the 5 litre version. Before you start removing the existing paint take a good look at the case pieces and where they are and are not painted for when you come to re-paint.
So basically what you do is soak the bits of the case in this alcohol stuff for a couple of hours and then scrub the paint off. But it's not quite that simple. The paint won't come off in one go, you have to soak, scrub, repeat. After some trial and error I found the best method was to get a plastic storage box big enough to fit one of the side panels in lying down, pour a couple of litres of alcohol in there and then soak as many pieces as I could get in there fully immersed at a time. I put the storage box in the bath. I suggest you do the same for reasons that will become apparent. I could have sworn I took pictures of this but the contents of both my phones says otherwise.
Whilst you're doing this you should definitely crack a window open. If your bathroom has an extractor fan turn it on. Generally make sure there's some airflow going on as the alcohol fumes can be quite potent. You may also want to wear some eye protection in case of splashes. (B&Q have a good selection). The paint on the side panels, that'll come off pretty easy. The paint of the other panels, not so easy. Removing the paint took me two - three days in all. Even then I hadn't managed to get all of the paint off of the front/top/back panels. No matter how much I soak and scrubbed there was still some grey paint residue on there. This was a bit disappointing, but I pressed on regardless. I used some cheap toothbrushes for the scrubbing to start with. (Got them from Morrisions, 30p for 4. I thought that was astounding value until my housemate told me he found 3 for 10p in some local cheapo shop.) Later on I remembered I had an old battery powered electric toothbrush in the back of a drawer and used that. It was noticeably more effective. The scrubbing can get messy as the paint comes off. Don't wear clothes you don't mind splashing the odd bit of paint and alcohol on and do it over the bath or a sink. When you're done with the alcohol don't tip it down the drain, get a suitable container and use a funnel to pour it in there. You can keep it and use it again. (Don't pour it back in with any unused alcohol as there'll be some paint in there.) Here's a side panel minus it's paint.
You'll notice in the picture of the panel that Apple logo still has it's paint on. That's because it's a separate piece stuck on the outside of the panel. Stuck on very well it is too as you'll find out if you do this. My plan called for the Apple logos to be lit up green, and that means the paint has to come off them too and that means I had to remove them from the panel. On the inside of the panel there are two small holes, one in the main body of the apple and one in the leaf.
What I did was to whack (literally) something of a suitable size in to those holes, then insert a ruler in to the minimal gap this created on the between the panel and the apple piece and use that to work the piece loose.
Sadly the act of hitting something in through the hole put a dink in each of the pieces. I couldn't work out anyway to remove them without pushing something through the hole. They are very well stuck on and as they sit in an indent on the panel there's no way to get underneath the, from the outside to pry them off. Once off I soaked the pieces in a bit of white spirit for half an hour after which the sticky gunky stuff peeled off very easily. Then chuck the pieces in the alcohol to soak and get rid of the paint. Don't take the pieces off until you've removed the paint from the panel. I did that on one panel, (you may have noticed the paint is still on in the photos), and it made getting rid of the paint a bit harder as the alcohol would drain out though the holes.
Whilst all the panels were off I cut up the metal case a bit. If you look at the back of the machine you'll see there's a guard over the power supply fan. Look at the piece of plastic that goes over that area, there's another guard on there. So the air is going through two guards that don't entirely line up and have a gap between them. I'm no wind tunnel engineer, but that seems like a good way to cause turbulence. Turbulence makes noise and the Quicksilver isn't the quietest so if it can be quietened a bit so much the better. Anyway, one of those guards has to go. Removing the plastic one isn't practical, but some quick work with a pair of tin snips and the metal one is gone.
Underneath the power supply fan there's another instance where there's vent holes in both the metal and the plastic. So some not so quick work with a pair of tin snips gets rid of that. (Would have been easier to use a Dremel type cutting tool in retrospect.)
At some point around this stage I put the motherboard etc back in to the case. As I mentioned earlier, this was actually about three weeks after I took it all out. Once I put it all back together the Mac wouldn't start up. No fans no nothing. I reset the PMU and then I got fans, but no bong noise and no booting. So for about fifteen minutes or so I thought I'd managed to damage something. Then I noticed the CPU card wasn't seated properly. So off came the heatsink again to sort that out, reassembled it all again and it was all good.
At some point I also removed the wireless antenna stuff from the outside of the case. This was done for two reasons. One, because I wouldn't have to work around it later on. Two, because on the side of the case which hinges down you'll find that removing the antenna stuff leaves a nice small oval hole near one edge and that saved me having to create a hole later. If this Mac ever gets wireless it certainly won't be using the Airport Card slot since those cards won't do things like 802.11g or WPA2 and are really not worth anywhere near the money they cost even if you can find them.
To paint the panels I used Plasti-Kote Super Black Gloss. You can get it in B&Q or Hobbycraft or somewhere like that. You also need plenty of masking tape and some newspaper. Use the masking tape to tape off all those side parts and edges you don't want painting and tape some newspaper in place to entirely cover the side of the panel that's not being painted. Here's the front panel all taped up ready to be painted.
Notice the speaker hole, that's all taped up so that the sides of it don't get painted. I left that clear so some LEDs can shine through it. OK, so some of you spotted that's not the whole front panel in the pictures, the top bit is missing. Did I mention that when I was scrubbing the paint off I manage to snap the panel? No? Well, I did. How? Beats me. Here's the side panel from the side of the case which opens all taped up ready to be painted.
You'll notice I've removed the handle as that doesn't need painting and I've covered up the Apple logo in the middle so that doesn't get painted. That was done by just sticking a couple layers of masking tape over it all and then cutting around with a craft knife. Notice also the bits that stick out containing the screw holes are taped up. I left them clear so that the light will shine out there around the screw heads.
Before you paint each piece put some alcohol on a clean rag and give the panel a good rub down. If you look at the original Quicksilver colour scheme you'll notice that the side panels are a different shade of grey to the front/top/back panels. The same is true once they've been repainted as the front/top/back panels are lot more opaque. I ended up doing two coats on the more front/top/back panels and three on the side panels.
For the side panel lights I used a pair of Sunbeam cold cathodes because that's the brand my local computer store sells and you can get them as a pack of two running off one inverter. To fit in the gap between the metal and plastic sides of the case, you need to remove the actual cold cathode part from it's plastic casing. I have a cold cathode of unknown brand where this is easy, the cube bits at either end can just be yanked off. With the Sunbeams they're glued up at the end where the wire comes out. I used a dremel type tool to carefully cut through the cube at the wire end and then got the tin snips in to any available gap and used them to bust it open. Wear eye protection when doing all this and when using the tin snips hold the whole lot in a box or something else plastic shards will fly everywhere. Here's one of the dismantled cathodes installed on the side of the case that opens, alongside the one I hadn't dismantled yet.
The dismantled cathode is small enough to be fed through the screw hole (circled red) freed up by removing the airport antenna stuff earlier on. It's secured to the case using a double sided sticky pad at each end. There is a piece of insulating tape underneath it to keep the thin wire that runs along it from touching the metal of the case.
With the lights fitted it's time to get an idea of how those side panels are going to look lit up.
The Apple logo still has the masking tape on it in this picture. You can see the light shining out around the screws which was nice to see looked just as I had envisaged. The glaring problem however is that big fat bright line of green. That's the cold cathode light shining straight through the three layers of paint. I quickly dismissed the idea of trying to put on more paint to block it. That light is bright, it would take a lot of paint and quite probably more than would be practical to apply to block it. Some cunning was called for in the form of black insulation tape stuck on the inside.
A single layer of tape blocks the light out really well. Once I'd bought some more tape I covered the rest of the inside. Here's the second cold cathode dismantled and attached to the side of the case that doesn't open. You can see I cut out the metal between two of the vent holes to route the wire through.
You can see on the right of the photo there's a piece of translucent plastic over where the vent holes for the fan used to be. This is because I decided to cut out all those vent holes to increase air flow and reduce noise. Then I realised that whole vent is pointless since it just blows air against the plastic side of the case. So I covered up the big hole I'd made so the air goes out the back vent instead. (I've actually now disconnected the big 12cm fan to reduce noise. No adverse effects have been apparent as yet.)
The speaker hole on the front is lit up using a green Sunbeam Lazer LED. I removed the silver casing around the LEDs and bent the wire so they all point in the same direction. They're then just taped to the inside of the case pointing upwards just below where the part of the bezel that surrounds the speaker pokes through the case. No photos of that but you can figure it out and see the effect in the photos.
For front USB and Firewire ports there's a neat looking product called the Sweet Multiport. It even has a card reader in it. Sadly although the item itself is reasonably priced given the US$ to British Pound exchange rate, their shipping rates to England are significantly higher than the cost of the product itself making the total cost higher than I am willing to pay. (Especially given that I would still have to buy a USB 2 card as the Multiport just uses some of your existing USB/Firewire ports rather than including a proper PCI USB/Firewire card and hence also adding USB 2 and extra ports.) Since Apple decided to shape the opening below the CD drive on the Quicksilver specifically to a zip drive, this means that using one of those 3.5" bay port adaptors is no good. Also nearly all the bay adaptors I found assumed the presence of USB/Firewire motherboard headers which the Quicksilver doesn't have. In the end I worked out my own hack for a USB port and am thinking about a Firewire port. I have a USB card reader so I'm not bothered about incorporating a card reader. The Belkin USB card I put in has an internal port on it, partly why I bought it, so I ran an extension cable from that to the hole in the front where the zip drive would go. I needed something to hold the end of the extension cable in place in that hole. I ended up gutting an old floppy drive of everything except the front bezel, which I sprayed black. That's mounted in the bay which would hold the zip drive, with the end of the extension cable wedged into the front bezel slot. Crude, but it works. Left to right: Top down view of the gutted floppy drive mounted in the removed drive bay with the cable in it, front view of same, the assembly in the case.
I covered up the hole with some more of the translucent plastic sprayed black on the inside and with a hole cut in for the port. It's not a very neat or pretty solution but it works.
I replaced the original white LED behind the power button with a blue one. It's a 3mm one that cost 99p from Maplin. Changing the LED is easy if you have a soldering iron and a solder sucker. If you look inside the front of the case you'll find a circuit board held on with a couple of screws. Free it from the case and unplug the ribbon cable to take it out and work on it. Here's a picture of the circuit board with the blue LED in it hooked up and working
The blue box behind it is the cold cathode inverter.
So that's pretty much it. I have to say that the over all effect wasn't quite as good as I hoped. This is due to several things. There's my not being able to get off all the silver paint from some of the panels which leaves a slightly mottled effect on the top and front panels. There's my some how managing to snap the front panel in two, though that's not too noticeable when both pieces are attached. Then there's the inconsistent paint coverage in areas I originally wanted clear, like the edges of the side panels which you can see in some of the front on shots. (I may try and tidy that up at some point.) On the upside the blue power LED looks nice and when the Mac goes to sleep all the green lights go out leaving just the pulsing blue LED on the front. (No photos of that as yet.) The green lights all run off the 12v supply in the molex connectors and evidently that supply is shut off during sleep mode.
To finish here's some photos of not great quality of the finished Mac. You can see how the side panels are still shiny enough to reflect the TV and flash.
modified:28th May 2007