Benford Does Stuff

Threre’s more progress on the iMac project now; the iShell (iMac sans the blinky bits) now is notably less shell like. Instead of being an empty vessel, fish tank materiel or a catbed, it now has a working lcd screen, and furhtermore, takes the cake as one of the world’s largest lcd monitors relative to its screen size.  

How, you might ask? More deatils after the break…
So it all begins with a simple 15″ Dell LCD monitor acquired via the List of Craig. After I figured out how to get the LCD guts out, it resembled something a bit more like this:

Give me back my Face!

I unfortunately forgot to take a picture of the thing before removing the liquid crystals and their encaseing matter, and as such, have no choice but to leave to original up to the reader’s imagination (or just as likely, an image search). The remaining plastic here might see a second life as a picture frame, or an ant farm.

Please pay no attention to the Phantom Hand on the right

The monitor guts look fairly natural inside the iShell. One must wonder if some company in the Far East secretly sniggers at our brand loyalties, when they are making every machine, dells, fruits, et al alike. I am especially pleased that the monitor backing looks “natural” since it will be highly visible in the finished product. The motherboard and remaining computer guts will be attached on the “floor” of the iMac, perpendicular to the LCD backing. 

between an iRock and a hard place

The LCD fit almost perfectly within the existing CRT zone! I highly reccomend 15″ LCD montiors for any future iMac mods. I could not have asked for two things from entirely differnent product lines to fit together.  I did have to remove a slight amount of plastic from the screw mounts at each corner. After that, the monitor locked in super tight, and was level within several thousanths of an inch relative to the iShell case. Huzzah for my Dad and shop logic!

Of course, this could not be complete without some pictures of this unholy alliance in action, now would it?

Mod? What Mod?

The whole thing looks natural from the outside too, for which I am glad. I’m really looking forward to taking this to a wifi hotspot now.

Mind the gap...

I will need to get some weather stripping to fill the gap between the LCD’s flatness and the curved case’s non-flatness. 

Now, for some action shots:

Wait for it... wait for it

If you dual boot two copies of windows 7 Betta, they'll fight to the death

Taking the cake, the Dell logo breifly pops up during startup when the monitor first powers on. How is that for branding?

Now you're thinking with portals

Of course, we couldn’t not show a 3D guided tour of Aperture Science as a benchmark. 

There’s still lots to do here. All of the computer parts still live in an external case, and it will be quite the challange corralling all of them into place. Until next time, stay tuned!