[Beowulf] Cases for DIY boxen

[Peter St. John]

Robert,

Yes, the consensus (offline) had seemed to be that humidy, thermal
insulation, etc are not issues; and the only issue would be flammability.
And yeah, I actually watched a capacitor explode under ideal circumstances
(it was shadowed dark behind the box where I was looking, wondering why the
prototype game box was behaving badly); it shot a beautiful little jet of
flame.

Incidentally, Sebastian Hyde has pictures of a really beautiful black walnut
PC. I think the right word is "baroque". Really beautiful. But yeah
consideration would have to made for the fire issue.

Peter

On 10/23/08, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Peter St. John wrote:
>
>  On the subject of Doug's "A Case for Cases"
>> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7164, I had noticed that the Helmer thing
>> ("bewwulf in an Ikea cabinet") is not
>> really in a wood cabinet (the steel box can be put inside a cabinet). I'm
>> assuming it's unreasonable to actually make a wood cabinet? On account of
>> humidy, or just weight? To me it just sounds easy to build a wooden rack
>> for
>> a bunch of ATX motherboards. And it could look nice. Thermal and
>> electrical
>> insulation would be OK, and humidy controlled with a good paint job on the
>> interior...?
>>
>
> What about fire?  Anything electrical can in a worst case pop hot/molten
> metal before frying and/or blowing a breaker.  Capacitors blow up
> (literally).  A wire is badly soldered and pulls free and grounds out,
> spattering white hot metal.
>
> Inside a metal shell, odds are you won't get a REAL fire as there isn't
> much actively flammable around.  In a wooden box, carefully dried by six
> months of 50C heat... it wouldn't take a lot to get real flames,
> especially if the box had e.g. a cooling fan mounted to actively fan a
> hot coal into flames.
>
>   rgb
>
>
>> Peter
>>
>>
> --
> Robert G. Brown                            Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
> Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305
> Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
> Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb <http://www.phy.duke.edu/%7Ergb>
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