Yeah, neat idea. A year or two ago I built an Advantech 486 SBC into a custom wooden enclosure.

In my case I added a mini 3-slot ISA riser/backplane so that I could add a network card and a soundcard.

It's slightly bigger than you are looking at, but essentially is a full featured PC with floppy, NIC, real ISA soundcard, XT-IDE HDD support etc, I also upgraded the DX4 486 to a Cyrix 5x86-120. It will play pretty much everything bar late era 3D SVGA dos games.

Mine is in old IBM external tape drive enclosure

DundyTheCroc wrote on 2025-12-16, 10:15:

Mine is in old IBM external tape drive enclosure

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That's a really great idea - it already has a drive bay!

I've had a look on eBay but they don't seem to be as cheap as I would have expected - I guess there is still an actual need to recover old tape backups etc?

What are the dimensions of your one?

justin1985 wrote on 2025-12-18, 16:07:

That's a really great idea - it already has a drive bay!

I've had a look on eBay but they don't seem to be as cheap as I would have expected - I guess there is still an actual need to recover old tape backups etc?

What are the dimensions of your one?

28x28x8 cm.

I went ahead and hacked around the G-Tech RAID NAS enclosure to work with the 3.5" SBC, plus an AC'97 style audio and USB breakout, and a GoTek in a slim case.

This took quite a bit of hacking out of a large enough area of the side grilles for the main I/O, and annoyingly I hadn't accounted for how low down the outer case comes down, meaning I've had to file some notches into that too. Fitting standoffs to the base of the case was quite easy though - I printed the mechanical drawing from the motherboard manual at scale size, glued it to the case, and drilled out at 3mm. For the USB and audio, I just opened out the existing Firewire port locations a bit and used one of the existing standoffs, plus one hole for new one. I even squeezed in a secondary 44pin CF to IDE adapter just mounted haphazardly on a tall standoff screwed into one of the existing holes.

The end result is pretty neat in terms of getting everything (even a "floppy") into such a small space, I think! However, having cables coming out both the back and side doesn't seem ideal, not least in terms of actually taking up quite a bit of desk real estate (relative to its size). The case cover itself is quite badly worn too, with scratches through the anodized surface of the aluminium, which probably means spray painting would be the only way to improve it (or look out for another example of the NAS in better condition).

Still kind of tempted to experiment with what I can do with the tall thin LaCie drive enclosure. The design of that, with the original PCB on one side and the HDD on the other,offset towards the front, probably means that it will be necessary to replace the PCB with a solid plate (blank PCB rigid and provide grounding?) to provide something to mount the motherboard to (on the HDD side). I guess a more compact single Audio breakout (DIY?) and single USB might be better, and might even fit on the PCB side? I'd love to be able to squeeze in a 44-pin IDE CF adapter facing outwards, but that would probably be a struggle! Also wondering about fitting a blower fan (salvaged from a Dell Mini PC) at the front, just to create some airflow ...