Woody 400

The woody 400, a fully capible desktop computer in a wooden case. Many may be asking, "But Corbin, why build a wooden computer?" Well, looks! Plain and simple. It's my attempt to bring in that 1970's electronics charm to modern technology.

About a year ago (2004) I built a wooden case for a stereo in shop class. The amp I put into it was, to say the least, "inadequate" for my tastes and sounded rather crappy so I never used it. About that time, I came into posession of an old computer from my Father's office. It took me about 6 months to realize that the motherboard for that computer fit nearly perfectly into the case! A couple hours and a few Dremel cutting disks later I had the computer you see above.

The motherboard sports a Celeron processor running at 400Mhz, 64MB of ram, onboard sound, USB, and standard ports. It's not much, but it will run Linux and is plenty good for web browsing.

Update: I have upgraded the memory to 96MB and added a 4 gig hard drive. Oh yea, and I upgraded the OS to DSL 1.0.1 :D.

The power supply came from the same computer as the motherboard. I had to remove the case for space reasons, but I am going to try and put in some shielding around it, you can hear it whining when you use the micrphone input on the sound card.

The hard drive was a bit more tricky to mount than the power supply or the motherbard, there was no floorspace left in the box so I had to dig around in my junk box for a solution. Sure enugh, the junk box had just what I needed! A peice of scrap plastic made a nice little shelf to mount the hard drive to.

This is the fan assembly. It's pretty much a fan hot glued to some scrap wood on the cover of the unit. When the cover is placed on the box, the fan will suck air across the heatsink of the processor, then it will be exhausted from a vent above the ports.

Here is the back Panel of the computer, I merely cut out holes for the ports and the fan exhaust with my (ancient) Dremel. For a first timer, I belive I did a rather good job :)

Here it is all put together. I'm still suprised I was able to get everything into that box!

This is only the first part of a larger project. I still have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and disk drive bay to build, though I dont know when I will be able to do so. Check in every couple of months for updates.