Some people like classic cars and then some people like classic computer cases.

In 1991, SGI introduced the Iris Indigo. In addition to being an awesome 3D system, the Indigo was a really sharp looking box. I never owned one, but I did use them on occasion while I was a computer engineering student at Texas A&M. In the last year of my master's degree at Texas A&M, I watched as over a dozen Indigo boxes were heaped into a dumpster.

That night, I came back with my future wife and one of my good friends to see what could be salvaged. The boxes themselves, had been stripped of anything of value - hard drives, memory, etc. But as I stood in the dumpster, I knew what I must do. I have to use one of these boxes for a PC case. We pulled out several cases that were still in good condition as well as some other hardware that had been discarded.

I didn't have enough time or money to do anything with it then, so it was put into storage. Two years later, my wife and I finally decided to do something with it. After a few weeks of work (mostly on the weekends), we finished it.

First we removed all of the metal from the case. This turned out to be harder than we anticipated. We knocked out the inside partitions with a hammer and a chisel (they were reiveted together). Then we used a pair of robo-grips to bend the inner metal walls away from the outer plastic walls.

I forgot to take pictures of all the walls and junk that was inside, before we threw them away. These cases are built like armored fortresses.

With the metal internal structure gone, we built a new support structure from plexiglass. We cut four side walls and glued them together. Then we cut several smaller panels for shelves. The joints are taken from an old erector set. In this shot you can see the shelf for the power supply is drying. At this point we also glued "rails" into the box and mounted the motherboard onto a peice of plexiglass.

Then we started cutting on the back of the case. This is where a dremel comes in handy. Some parts of it had to be cut out with a mini-hack saw.

In this shot you can see the holes that we have cut for the powersupply and for access to the motherboard cards and ports.

At this point we can slide the motherboard into the case. We added several "bays" where the hard drives will reside. They are drying in this picture (lower right part of the case).

Nearing the end, we started adding the final details. We mounted a button to the case cover, cut a back panel from stratoboard, and connected all of the components.

You would never know it's not a real Iris Indigo.

My motherboard didn't come with one of those metal inserts that covers the ports. Otherwise the back panel would look a little cleaner around the ports.

You may have noticed there's no floppy drive and no internal cdrom. That is by choice. I haven't used a floppy disk in years. And Indigos weren't designed to have internal cdroms. I would have had to cut the front cover to make one fit. Instead, I picked up a USB Iomega cdrom drive. The color sold me.

The hardware itself isn't particularly remarkable. But since some people have asked.. I am using a Soyo K7ADA motherboard with a 1.2 Ghz T-bird and 512 megs of DDR ram. I went with this particular motherboard because it's considerably smaller than most of the other motherboards I was looking at. This was important since the Indigo is a fairly small case.

The only cards in the system are a Radeon graphics card and an ethernet adapater. I use a USB Happy Hacking keyboard, a USB optical mouse, a USB cdrom, and a USB media card reader.