Arrr! External HDD enlosure pirate style!

Avast, me mateys! Tis' be about time that a pirate mod be made!

Actually there may already be some out there, I just never looked very hard :). Either or this past semester at college, my roommates and I really got ourselves into a pirate mood. Seriously, we were playing pirate music and pirate-based computer games for quite a while. Since the summer was coming up as well as the third and final installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (which by the way I saw opening night and thought was excellent :)) I decided it would be time for a pirate computer mod to be done.

Due to limited time this summer I had to do something small so I came up with the idea of a harddrive enclosure made out of a small pirate treasure chest to hold all of my pirate stuff I have (mainly my Monkey Island games as well as my piratey music - gotta love it:)). I found some cool treasure chests over at www.deadmentellnotales.com that looked like they would do the trick just fine (that and they were pretty low priced too :))

As you can see here, the treasure chest isn't very roomy inside so I have to mount the drive in at an angle although it is still upright itself so I shouldn't have a problem with the drive platter getting unbalanced resulting in I/O failures.

Fortunately the guts I am using take their power straight from the 5V line from the USB to power everything which means less cutting holes but I still had the problem of where to conceal the actual USB connector.

For that, my friend bought me a little POTC locket thing that would be perfect to hide a USB behind.

Sorry Jack, but your picture had to come out

I dremeled out a hole with the cutting wheel to fit the USB connector inside it. Took a while and ultimately had some non-straight edges but the USB connector covers it up pretty well.

Next step was to cut the same hole into the chest and dremel the edges around it to compensate for the roundness of the locket.

Here is the final result all Gorilla Glued into place.

Unfortunately that is all I have right now as I have to wait for some other parts to come in the mail. Mainly the USB wire that goes from the drive to the side of the chest. Unfortunately again because of the small space I have to work with I had to "special order" a right angle USB adapter that would fit http://www.ntcdistributing.com/image...02-24large.jpg I'm going to have to trim away some of the plastic on the mounts where the screws are to get it to fit, however that shouldn't prove to be too hard.

Also I plan on getting some gold mylar cable sleeving from cableorganizer.com. That will give the USB cable that is used to connect the drive to the back of my computer that "gold pirate treasure" feel to it. :)

That's all that I have right now. It's not much, but I didn't feel like waiting until the end of this week to post everything :) ARR! Give me feedback on what you guys think so far!

That looks cool!

If you made a cover over the drive, you could still use the chest to store things in too.

+rep

I was actually thinking about that as well, at least use it to store the USB cable while traveling - still working on what to cover it with though. Anyone have any ideas? I suppose I could use something like a thin sheet of aluminium.

I'd go with a small wooden drop in tray, similar to some jewellery boxes.

nice. makes me want to do something with my external drive. in fact, i looks like the IDE to USB converter in there is the same as mine, lol.

+rep

Remember hard drives generate heat so it will need some ventilation or some kind of heat sink in the box. Nice mod though I love the locket usb plug cover.

+rep

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DeathCrush

As you can see here, the treasure chest isn't very roomy inside so I have to mount the drive in at an angle

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That's with the interface already connected, right?
It should be possible to use a short length (couple of inches or so) or 40 way IDE cable and mount the adaptor remotely. Then you could possible mount the drive flat leaving a lot more room for pieces of eight.

You really ought to make it look like it's got treasure in it.

I would, but unfortunately I'm using a 50pin laptop drive and so far I have not been able to find a 50pin IDE cable (not even sure it's possible to buy one) I would be willing to make my own from parts but I haven't even been able to find anything.

would u be able to use this ??

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Computer-Geek

would u be able to use this ??

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That's actually for a laptop cdrom, although I did think about getting it and making my own cable. That may be a bit too much work however, I might just stick with my original idea.