Finished!

Finally Done.  I finished setting it up on Monday, it took several hours to put in all of the electronics, to do the wiring and, of course, to take a bunch of pictures.  Let's start with the before:

The previous set up.

The old entertainment unit.

And here we see the wiring problem.

More wiring.

Not pretty.

OK, now that we got that out of the way, let's look at the finished cabinet:

Here it is, still in the basement

View from the back with the removable back in place

The top.  It took four coats of polyurethane to get it right

Some of the smaller details:

Removable back with UHMW tape

I was looking for a solution for the removable back so it would slide smoothly in the grooves.  I was expecting to find some sort of wax but I found UHMW tape instead.  It works well.  The only downside was the tape was thicker than I expected so it was tough to apply evenly.  Also the back fits very snug, but it does slide smoothly and doesn't bind up at all which is what I was really looking for.

Powerstrips hidden behind the drawer.

Rear fan for the HTPC

Left Side: HTPC, Cable box & Network Switch

Right Side:  Wii, XBox 360, PS3

Onto the wiring.  As I said this took awhile.  I used a combination of cable ties with cable tie mounts and good ol' electrical tape for the thin speaker wires.

Finally, organized wiring.

The removable back in place, minimal wires exposed.

And lastly, the finished cabinet, all wired up and in place:

Hard to believe I started this project more than 8 months ago.  It took way longer than I thought it would but I'm really happy with the results and it was great learning experience.  Time to sit back and watch some TV.

HTPC "Case" Mod

The final piece to the cabinet is the Home Theater PC.  In our current set up we a have PC hooked up to our TV, so there definitely needed to be a place for that in the new cabinet.  I decided that, with all of the venting I put into the cabinet, instead of just throwing the PC on shelf, why not consider the cabinet to be the case and mount the components directly on one of the shelves?

So I modified one of the shelves.  First, I added a raised platform for the motherboard.  This platform sits about an inch off the shelf.  The reason for the raised platform is so that I could run all of the PC wiring under the motherboard instead of on top for a cleaner look and better air flow.

Shelf with raised platform

Raised platform from the side

I mounted the motherboard standoffs right to the wood platform.  I drilled a slightly smaller hole than the standoff and screwed them in.  They fit pretty snug, hopefully they'll hold.

Then, I mapped out where all of the components would go, again using Google SketchUp.  I actually used a couple of old Steel Tec sets (these came in really handy) to mount the components to the shelf and make a small rack for the hard drives.

All components installed

View form the top

Lastly, I wanted to put a face on the front that would hide the components and tie into the cabinet.  I made the face with some of the 1/4" plywood I used for the back and dyed it to match the cabinet.  I had an old Dell case lying around, which just so happened to have a great front panel that I could incorporate into the face.  It was the exact shape of a hole you could make with a router so I measured and cut the hole in the face and it turned out to fit perfectly. 

I also thought it'd be cool to disguise the DVD drive and make it look seamless.  I wasn't sure if it would actually work but I thought it was worth a shot.  I cut another hole in the face then took a separate piece of plywood for the DVD drawer and rounded the sides manually using a Dremel tool.  Finally, because I couldn't think of a better way, I super-glued the drawer piece to the DVD drawer.  It came out better than I expected. 

Front panel and DVD drawer

The HTPC case mod is complete.  As for the rest of the cabinent, I have finished varnishing and everything is assembled.  All that's left is to bring it up from the basement and wire in the components.  The plan is to do that on Monday and then finally be done.  Stay tuned for the unveiling!