Project: Christine

[bschott]

I did this case mod back in 2003 but I figured I'd post it up here per the request of CrimsonSky. I finally got those PM's from you ;-)

Anyway, I am a pc nut but I also love cars, classics to the imports to the exotics... Well talking with my good friend David Groth (a well known sybex author) in his shop, we came up with an idea to create a case mod based on a car. I first wanted to do a tuner but Dave suggested a Hotrod. During this brainstorming, I remember watching the movie 'Christine' the night before and thinking how nice the old fury looked.

So was born Christine...My original gaming PC.

I started out with this. (True geeks will remember this as the original dual 5 1/4 floppy IBM PC) You can see Dave's suggestion of a 'Hot Rod' with flames drawn onto the top. I found this old case collecting dust among faded 1980's style mountain dew case and playboy magazines in the back of a friends garage.


Well after I had a base case I started to get to work with Dave at the basic metal working. Dave does classic car restorations so his help with the welding and painting was INVALUABLE.


Some basic metel work, getting the grill fitted (which btw is from a 1960's Studebaker hawk), and the headlights installed (which work btw!) we had this....

While dave was getting that basic metel shaping done, I started stripping the paint from the case with an air-driven stone stripper and then I dremeled out the hood while dave got his paint booth ready.

Some bondo to fill the gaps, sanding by both dave and I to get the case ready for painting,

and a few coats of primer had us set to paint.....

After the paint booth we had a basic paint scheme down...

The final white stripe was put on, along with the 'windshield'...

For fun, dave added a keyboard and speakers for display only. We felt that if we were restoring an old PC, let's go all out....and not waste any mixed automotive paint.

I got the internals installed, including the watercooling setup, and we had this...

On Feb 04, 2004, Christine was featured on the pre-G4 Tech TV show "Screen Savers" along with other mods. linky here

Christine has also been featured in Dave's book "PC Chop Shop', Atomic PC Magazine 'Rig of the month', Gruntville's Feature Case of the month (two months running), Pimp Rig's Pimper's choice of the month rig, and a 2006 Case Mod Calender (May's Pinup case).

Current Internals:

AMD Athlon 3200XP, watercooled
2GB 3700 DDR
ATI X700
TruBlue 580Watt PSU
DVD-RW
200GB SATA HDD

Christine now running as a backup rig to my new main PC: Ultimedia Blue point Oh which I have just completed and has it's own case log here

THANKS TO DAVE FOR ALL THE HELP!


Link to Original Worklog