Re...Animating The Alienware: Part 2 (The Body)

 

 

After seemingly an endless number of screws to remove, the Alienware Aurora 7500 got disassembled! It's one complex case..... in fact; it's a case within a case. 

 

The number of plastic shell pieces was a little astounding! In fact, just the skin of the side panel alone was 3 separate pieces.. and that's not even including all the various fans, lights, and connectors.

 

In this case (literally) though, it turned out to be to my advantage. It allows for the pieces to be done in the faux carbon fiber look to be done separately and require very little masking! Oh, don't get me wrong: it's still a "pain in the a**", but not as bad as I first envisioned.

Now the trick will be for me to get all this done and put back together without getting confused and forgetting how everything fit and what screws went where!

The reassembly overall went pretty well. We had a bit of a problem getting the hinge of the door just right which necessitated some touch-up, but it's together. I'm generally pleased with the "carbon fiber" effect. If you'll look at the image of the top after the first coat of black versus the final product in the last image, you'll note quite a difference! This time around, I used another technique learned on YouTube; that of introducing a third color ("rubbed Bronze") that seems to really add some depth to the effect. As you can probably tell, the overall look is subtle, which is precisely what we were going for. Just so you know; I used Rustoleum spray paint exclusively on this project. I don't have anything against other brands, and they certainly aren't paying me for this, but I've had good luck with them so I use it.

 

 

Of course, that'll just be the prelude to the main event...... the actual build.

ThinkPad Therapy

See, it's like this........ When I'm frustrated with something, and I can't resolve the problem to my satisfaction, what I do is to fix something. That generally means a computer, or two..... As you guys know, I've been going round and round with Dell over the charge connector on my son's tablet. So far, the results haven't been very good. So over the course of the last few days, I've resorted to self-medicating! No, not like that!

My form of self-medicating started out with a lavender colored IBM ThinkPad X30. About a year and half ago when my then-four-year-old daughter needed a computer. Unlike my son who wasn't really delivered, but "booted-up", she wasn't as electronics oriented as the boy. So I endeavored to make her first computer more "friendly", when experimenting with a rather large and black ThinkPad A21p didn't go very well. So I found her a small "X Series" machine that had enough power to get her on the internet to play some games, and yet be small and unintimidating. Thus was born the "Princess Edition", X30 that I spent the better part of a week painting to get ready for her birthday that year. Well, time has come and gone, as have Patches and Service Packs, which didn't do the old girl any good. So, a few weeks ago, I breathed some life (screen, SSD, RAM) into a derelict X61 and baby girl got an upgrade. This of course left a $3000+, in year-2002-dollars laptop which runs on a PIII-M! If I was in any way normal, it would have found it's way to the garage to sit in a box till eventually it would be disposed of. 

But No.....that's NOT what frustrated, Frugal Propellerheads do! I already had an X31 base (P-M/1.6) sitting in a cabinet, so why not slap together a knock around laptop. However, it was lavender! Can't be seen running around with a lavender laptops, now can we? So, an hour of sanding time later, it was no longer black. I had for some time watched YouTube videos showing guys (some, more successful than other) painting most anything to look like carbon fiber. Here was the perfect excuse to "give it a go" as our British friends would say. The lid already had been none-too-gently sanded; so what you see here are the results.

I sprayed the entire thing silver, taped on the liner, then sprayed on flat black through the rubber mesh. This is what it looked like after the liner was taken off. As you can see, I made a mistake in not stretching the material flat to eliminate the creases.

In this second picture, I had "fogged" the lid with the flat black and the creases aren't nearly as obvious.

After a second fogging, it's much more uniform, and is now awaiting a "satin" clearcoat.

After the clearcoat, it actually looks pretty good, for a really quick-slapped-together job. Over all, I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly since it was for therapy anyway. So people paint, others do wood-working: I work on computers!