A good reason to build a workbench
This little box is going to hold a VIA ME6000, a quiet hard disk, and a wireless ethernet card. The parts of it have been sitting stacked in a box since I found the stained glass pieces at SCRAP in January.
I started working on this project soon after I found the stained glass, but put it on hold when I realized that there was no way I'd be able to successfully build it either on the basement floor or on the dining room table. But after building the workbench, I've now got a working surface that's not going to be preempted for dinner or trod on by thousands of tiny feet.
The rest of the plan for this box is to make a nice wooden top (a sheet of some pretty reddish wood -- not mahogany, but some other tropical wood -- I got in a box of scrapwood from The Joinery) that will have a pretty ventilation grating in the middle. The back panel of the box will be cluttered up with the backpanel of the computer (maybe; I've still to decide whether to push the motherboard forward and build a bunch of short adapter cables to connect the back panel of the motherboard to a low-profile backpanel at the back of the case, or to just use the ATX-format backpanel the way it is. I've got a couple of pieces of green glass that I will use to fill out the back panel, I just have to decide what ratio of back panel to green glass I want.
The Factory Case has the motherboard mounted to a wooden panel (and that wooden panel is the floor of the case), but it gets pretty hot (with a VIA EPIA5000, which is not the hottest modern processor out there) so I will need to vary the mounting a little bit. I may see if I can find some little high-end-audio-style metal spike feet, and use them as the feet for the case, or I may just drill holes in some marbles (provided I can find a way to drill the holes without converting the marbles into rapidly expanding clouds of sharp glass fragments) and screw them into the bottom of the case. The motherboard will probably stand up quite a bit from the bottom of the case to allow for airflow under the processor.
And, yes, in case you're wondering, I have more computer cases than I have uses for them. I'll probably start making SCRAPpy rackmount cases next, after I finish the threatened computer desk for the best.