The 5.25" Drawer

The 5.25" Drawer, Day 1 (14th March 2010)

With an Antec TwelveHundred as my computer case I happen to have quite a lot of extra space. There are room for 9 HDDs at the same time as 3 DVD drives, and since I only have 3 HDDs and 1 DVD drive, that gives me a lot of 5.25" bays free.

So today I decided to look a little closer into how I could put some of these bays into use. A lot of fabricators offered stuff like fancontrol and temperature monitors, however, fancontrol is already built-in on the Antec, so I had to come up with something else.

After looking at different opportunities, I decided that a drawer would be cool, and if integrated with the rest of the design, it might even LOOK cool!

A few searches in google told me that 5.25" bay drawers don't exacly come in all colors and shapes, but I found some pretty interesting reading about people that had been MAKING drawers of their own. Among the suggestions I found a few that used the casing from an old CD/DVD drive and mounted a better suiting front onto that.
My instant thought: I have these parts laying around, let's get to it!

So I gathered the needed parts and started tearing apart an old CD-writer

And that is about as far as I got before I realised that I might actually need some tools to get this thing done properly.

The 5.25" Drawer, Day 2 (15th March 2010)

First, a quick runthrough at the local hardware store for some tools.

Then the part that probably took me the longest, shortening the old CD-writer.
^{Mental note to self: Cheap equipment are NOT the best for quality work.}

With some metal-twisting and luck* I managed to mock together something that actually fit into the 5.25" bay, altho it couldn't really be used as a drawer just yet.
^{*The front piece matched the cut CD-writer with some screws, the matching holes were unintended.}

The 5.25" Drawer, Day 3 (16th March 2010)

Time to get some "interior work" done, and to make it functional.

Measured up the inside of the drawer and cut/folded some paper that fits as inside. Makes the surfaces look more smooth, and more inviting than the inside of the metal-casing. This also gave me a rear wall in the drawer.

I also put a pin in place to serve as handle.

It's a tight fit, but the drawer goes almost all the way into the 5.25" bay.

Then some testing/demonstration of how much space it has.

Maximum tested capacity: 3 CDs with covers.

Last thing I put in place was some "pollows" underneeth, to avoid scratching the metal on top of the DVD-writer I've got in the 5.25" bay below it.

Final thoughts? Well, first of all, I've realized that planning ahead is better than taking everything as it comes. Secondly, I'll remember that cheap metal-cutting tools are cheap for a reason!