Hi all,

I am restoring an old 8088 Turbo XT clone PC. One of the things that is bugging me is the way that the motherboard is fastened on the case.

The motherboard has nine holes to connect it to the case, and the case has matching nine holes in it.

In six of them, I find these annoying plastic standoffs. (I recall later 286 PCs and 386 PC motherboards also had plastic standoffs, but the ones I have seen them have are different, like this: https://www.thinkcables.com/STANDOFFS-MotherB … C-100-PACK.html )

The ones that this PC seems to have are these: http://www.hardware-andfasteners.com/sale-855 … ard-cs0322.html

In two of the nine corners, there are these brass standoffs, that are female on the bottom end to fasten onto the PC case from underneath/outside the case, and male on the top end to stick through the motherboard screw holes - but the motherboard was never fastened to these brass standoffs, they just served as some kind of guider/alignment/loose stand for the board.

We also have brass standoffs on modern PC motherboards&cases, however the modern kinds of standoffs are much shorter (about half the height?), and they are in inverted orientation from this PC (female on the top, and male on the bottom to connect to the case; this PC has it the other way around, male on the top, and female on the bottom to connect to the case), so they won't work here as-is.

I'd love to get rid off all these plastic standoffs, since the plastic gets really stiff as decades go by and they break easily when one uses pliers to remove them - and needing to use pliers in the first place to remove the motherboard is really tedious.

Ideally I'd put nine of those tall brass standoffs onto the motherboard, but I'd want to have them be female on the top side as well, so that I could put regular screws through the motherboard onto those brass standoffs. So now I'm searching through items like this: https://www.amazon.com/Standoff-Hexagon-Mothe … ref=sr_1_2_sspa though I am a bit unsure if that will work - I guess I'll have to take exact measures, and just have to try. Would this kind of method make sense? Anything that you find flawed in this kind of attempt?

All this made me wonder - is it just this one 8088 clone PC that uses this kind of annoying motherboard connection mechanism? Or was this a standard back in the day? How do you handle fitting your 8088 mobo onto its case? Any good purchases on this front?

Cheers!