Leatherman Punchdown Tool

Something that I always have at my side, is my Leatherman Wave. It has all kinds of tools that can help out at a moments notice except for one, a punchdown tool! As a system admin, sometimes I have the need to terminate a keystone jack or punchdown block and I don’t have room in my pocket to carry a real punchdown tool with me everywhere I go. Now with this quick mod, I can!

Leatherman Wave with punchdown tool mod!

Something that I always have at my side, is my Leatherman Wave. It has all kinds of tools that can help out at a moments notice except for one, a punchdown tool! As a system admin, sometimes I have the need to terminate a keystone jack or punchdown block and I don’t have room in my pocket to carry a real punchdown tool with me everywhere I go. Now with this quick mod, I can! Everyone that has a Wave knows about the “large screwdriver” aka “pry-bar.” I never understood it’s true meaning since you already have four different screwdrivers to choose from. Now you can ditch that and have a nice useful punchdown tool. (I can’t take full credit for this mod, It’s not exactly an original idea. A fellow employee had one and I thought it was cool.)

Construction

The first thing you will need to do is use a bench grinder or dremel to thin the metal down to about half the current thickness, 3/8″ from the tip in order to make it fit the block. Be careful not to make the tip sharp, you don’t want to cut the wire you’re trying to punch down.

Smoothing the tip.

Next you will want to file down and then sand both sides where you ground the thickness down. This will make it smooth and shiny.

Cutting the slot.

Now you can begin the fun part of cutting the slot for the “vampire teeth” of the punchdown block. Use your dremel to cut slightly into the middle of the tip. You will want to cut 1/8″ into the tip. You may want to widen the slot slightly. See the picture for reference.

Hooray, you now have a functional non-impact punchdown tool on your Leatherman!

Comparison to actual punchdown tool.

Comparison to original.

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MythBox

The goal of this project is to create a rack-mount MythBox. A MythBox is any machine running Linux and MythTV. It’s used to watch and record TV just like a DVR. Of course since this is a fully functional system, you can also store all you images, music, and other files as well as browse the web on it. I’ve been playing around with myth for some time now and really enjoy it. If you have ever used/seen Windows Media Center, it’s exactly like that except free!

The goal of this project is to create a rack-mount MythBox. A MythBox is any machine running Linux and MythTV. It’s used to watch and record TV just like a DVR. Of course since this is a fully functional system, you can also store all you images, music, and other files as well as browse the web on it. I’ve been playing around with myth for some time now and really enjoy it. If you have ever used/seen Windows Media Center, it’s exactly like that except free!

Construction

To start off… A while back Nathan brought me a crazy piece of rack-mount equipment that came from the hospital.(Didn’t steal it, they were throwing it away) We didn’t really know what it was, but it was composed of an aluminum case filled with circuit boards with bnc connectors all over the front and a scsi drive. It looked like you could connect a bunch of video equipment, keyboard and monitor up to it. After googling some of the serial numbers we came to the conclusion that this is what they connect the colonoscopy scopes up to. It’s basically an ass-camera box!

After it sat around my shop for a few months, it was finally time to do something with this thing. I tore out all the insides and trashed them. This left me with a nice open case. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on components for something as simple as a MythBox, so my sights turned towards my stockpile of Dell GX60s in the corner. These aren’t bad machines. In fact, they make excellent Linux boxes.

I’ve had a lot of experience going into these things, Dell really does a good job of making repair jobs tool-less. You can replace anything in the case without any tools at all. This was really good since the motherboard sits on a special plate that slides out easily. I was able to just take the motherboard out, drill a few holes and presto it fits right into the ass-camera box.

The power supply is basically the same way; just push a button and slide it out. The dimensions made the main section of the power supply fit perfectly, only the little plastic tab was in my way. I had to take the supply completely apart to get rid of that thing, but it wasn’t too hard to get back together. Another problem was the little hole for the power cord wasn’t quite big enough for this power supply, so I had to get out the big Dewalt cut-out tool and hack away at it.

I’ve become pretty good at fabricating simple drive bays out of old packing material that gets discarded. The straps on either side of the hard drive are steel straps used to wrap material onto pallets for shipping. It’s readily available at almost any factory, they just throw it away. I used a pneumatic rotary tool to cut the straps to size, then bent them at the appropriate spots. Put a few holes to mount the drive, bolt it inside the case and we’re done.

Even though Dell computers are really friendly to work with, they’re always using some kind of proprietary equipment. In this case, pretty much everything. The motherboard has funny connections on it for the front USB/Audio and the power switch with Power and HD LEDs. I could have probably just soldered everything to the main board, but just adding a few leads off of the little CP chip was just as easy. The power LED was a three-way, it would turn from green to amber if there was a problem, so I split it off and used two seperate LEDs for power and warning.

The front panel was pretty simple to work with. After I disassembled the original components, there were several screw holes in the front that I drilled out and stuck my LEDs and power switch in. I also cut out a place for an optical drive. I used somemore of the steel packing strips to make a bay for the CD-ROM. I made them in a similar fasion as the hard drive bay, except I bent the bracket the oposite direction and only attached it to the front of the case.

The final product is a functional MythBox! To be honest, it doesn’t look all the pretty, but it works. I have noticed that the machine is probably a little too sluggish because watching live TV is a little stop and go. Of course, this isn’t why I built it. This is just a backend server, I’m not going to be standing in front of my rack watching tv very often. I’ve tested out the recording capabilities and it seems to do just fine. Over all I would rate the performance a 7 out of 10. It is an old run down machine on the inside you know.

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The Box (Project Melfina)

After I had enough strength training carrying my old rig around, I decided to put FAYE into gaming retirement. (Now it’s my server!) And began working on a new easy-to-carry gaming machine.

After I had enough strength training carrying my old rig around, I decided to put FAYE into gaming retirement. (Now it’s my server!) And began working on a new easy-to-carry gaming machine.

Construction

I started planning for this project a long, long time ago. Guess I just thought it would be cool to have a gaming machine in a package that was ready to go. You might ask, “why not just get a laptop?” Well simply put, laptops rank right up there with metal working forges and the sun in terms of heat produced while gaming and I’ve seen too many fail to impress.

This is the box. Cleaned, cut, and under development. My apologies for not getting a pic before I already started.

Well, first thing’s first. I’ve got to find the perfect case. I searched all over the internet and couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, for the price that I wanted. Everything that I found on ebay was either too small, funny shaped, or too expensive. I put out the word about what I was looking for and low and behold a nice free case showed up at my door. Apparently factories throw this kind of stuff out and luckily someone went dumpster diving on my behalf. Thanks Dad!

Sharp edges are dangerous and must be neutralized.

Now the case wasn’t in the best condition. It had quite a few scratches and other battle scars all over it, plus the inside was covered in oil. To make it usable, it would need to be cleaned and the rubber padding taken out. After I started taking the case apart, I noticed that it wasn’t solid aluminum. Which I guess is a little easier to work with, but was disappointing. The padding was difficult to get out, but gave me a good 2 inches all the way around to work with. I took some good old aluminum wheel cleaner to the exterior and bent some of the aluminum supports back into shape.

Oh, here's Nathan. He decided to come help out.

The next step was planning out how all the internals were going to fit in. For this I opened up Visio and played around with a few ideas of where the big parts were going to fit. (Motherboard, Power supply, Hard Drive, etc.) After a little planning I decided to get started. I figured the first thing would be to get the case motherboard-ready. Now I’m not really good about figuring out exactly where I needed to cut and fabricate to get the pci slots and everything to fit perfectly, but I am good at butchering old cases. I have a little graveyard of old systems in my basement that have done nothing but gather dust. Lets do some frankenstein work and put some of those to use.

Here you can see the back panel I stole from the old 350 and the powersupply hole I cut.

I had several old 350 white box machines laying around that are completely riveted together. It was simple to unrivet the plate off the back of one and get a pattern to cut my case with. So, I got out my trusty Dewalt cutout tool and went at it. Turned out to be easier than I thought. Now I just needed something to fasten the motherboard to. That also ment cutting up that 350 case to salvage the motherboard platform which got stuck in place with a little liquid nails. I would have done something a little sturdier, but the case is just too thin for much else.

A close up of the LED and switch layout. Yes, that's a tractor ignition switch.

After getting the motherboard in, I had to worry with getting a power supply hole cut out. This was probably the most difficult part of construction. I fixed a small block in the bottom of the case and measured carefully, but still managed to cut it wrong. But, I managed to do some eyeball cutting and fixed it. Now it was getting time to figure out where I was going to vent the heat out of this little box. Without a lot of clearance on either side, I decided to go with five 50mm and one 60mm fans I got from allelectronics.com, three on each side. (intake and exhaust) This was a fairly easy process, only a drill is required to make six holes.

Here's that control panel being fitted.

After I got some cooling going on, I wanted to make a neat cover plate with fan controls and access to my power buttons and diagnostic leds. Again I went back to that torn apart 350 and cut out a nice piece of the steel cover/door to use as my panel. I’m all about windows, so I only wanted half to be a control panel and the rest to be acrylic. I took a trip to radio shack and bought a bag of misc. leds for the power, hd, and diagnosic lights. I also found a cool military toggle switch that I knew needed to be put on there.

Look at the mess of wire. Of course that's CAT5e, you must use what resources you have.

I’m not an electronics major, so instead of making my own fan controls, I let frozencpu.com do all the work. While I was there I decided to look around at everything else they have in their inventory and found a cool looking HDcooler/enclosure. This was great, since I had forgot all about where to put the HD. After all that It was time for assembly.

This is my attempt to control the wire jungle.

The panel was really easy to create. Just a bunch of cutting and drilling for the components. I also had to make a bracket for the HD cooler and figure out how to wire up that crazy toggle switch and power button.

Here I am cutting out one of the brackets for the Harddrive bay.

Before everything was said and done, I realized I didn’t have a disc drive, handy usb ports, or headphone/mic jacks. No sweat, time to get out the xacto knifes. The case being made of wood instead of completely aluminum paid off. It was simple to carve out a place for my slim DVD-RW and my ports.

Here is the final product.

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Color Applique

Dress up that plain, drab window in your case with an applique. Not just one of those crappy single color stickers mind you, a full color image of your choice with all the details!

This was actually one of my very first mods, so I’ll go ahead and say that it’s very easy. The first thing you’ll want to do is gather your supplies:

• Package of 8.5×11 inkjet Transparencies.(Usually pretty cheap at WalMart)
• Plenty of ink for your inkjet!

Next you’ll want to figure out what image you want to use. I’m a fan of Cowboy Bebop and my server is named FAYE, so what better picture to choose.

I found the desktop background at the adult swim website and added a little extra blue hue to it since I have a blue case with blue lights.(Figured I should stay with the color scheme) You have to be careful when choosing an image to use. You’ll need to choose one that’s fairly high resolution so you don’t have that jpeg blur when you print it out and you really don’t want an image with a crazy background. I personally look for anime characters or symbols that are fairly simple.

After you’ve decided on an image, you’ll have to open up your favorite image editor. Depending on the size of your case window, you may be able to skip cutting the image and just use one sheet. I use fireworks or gimp, but just anything that you can cut images into sections. I have a huge window on my case so I new it would take a little planning before I could cut the image. You have to measure the size of the case window and remember what the verticle and horizontal halfway point is. Once you take 30 seconds to measure, you can open up your image and if it’s not big enough to cover the window already, go ahead and blow up the resolution a little. I had to increase my image size to 13.5 by 17 inches. Even though it’s big enough to cover the window, we can’t just print it out. Unless you have a really big printer and found poster size transparencies. Now we’ll need to cut the image into four sections, each small enough to fit on a 8.5×11 piece of paper. Save each image as its own file.(See image below)

Image cut into pieces.

That last step was fairly easy, but I wouldn’t stick those transparencies in the printer yet. After you think you’ve gotten the image chopped up into small enough pieces it’s time to test it out. You can print the four images out in black and white on regular paper to see if they fit and look about right. It actually took me a little time fiddling with the images to get them to print out correctly. After your test sheets look okay, you can use scissors and cut the little margin the printer left off the inside of the images. You’ll want to leave the margin around the outer edge so you can be sure to cover the whole window. Now, you can use a little tape and lay it out in the window.

Quick layout print to see what it looks like.

Not too bad eh? As you can see, I used some construction paper. It was just easy to work with. If you like the way you’re image looks, it’s time to break the seal on that pack of transparencies. Remember to set your printer to print photo quality or whatever the highest setting it has. Some printers have a setting for transparencies that you can turn on. Now you can start printing those nice images! It’ll probably take a while and when one finishes, be sure to set it aside and let the ink dry for a while.

As soon as the ink is dry on the last sheet, you can cut the margins just like you did with the test pages. I went out and got an exacto photo cropping tool to do so because I can’t cut straight with scissors. Everything should be fairly simple from this point. I used plain clear tape around the entire edge of the window and small square in the middle to hold all four sheets.Final product! I know, I forgot to mirror the image.

Looking at it when done, I noticed that the transparencies were just too clear and you really couldn’t see the image in the window from a distance. To fix this I traced the outline of the image onto a sheet of wax paper and cut it out. Then I used clear adhesive (glue stick) to attach it to the back of the transparencies. This means we can get rid of that little square piece of tape holding the middle of all the sheets together, the wax paper will support the sheets good enough.

This is our file server Julia.

My friends and I have performed this mod a number of times and it gets simpler with each time. I don’t think I’ll ever have just a plain case window ever again.

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