The summer before heading off to freshman year of college, I upgraded from an old family Pentium 1 to a custom built Pentium 4 computer. I was also enthusiastic to do a case mod, as thats what everyone who was cool and building their own computers did. I started with just good cable management and some fancy lights and fan grills.

After freshman year, I decided to go a step further and lose the 'flower' window design. At first I couldn't decide what to do, so sketched out some possibilities in PaintShopPro:

I decided to go with the 'tie-fighter' design, and so got to cutting and filing. I also painstakingly cut out a dragon design out of aluminum flashing with an exacto knife to add some custom flare to the front. I was very happy with the result:

but then after freshman year I had to go at it again. This time I also wanted to add functionality by providing better cooling with a fan in front. I started by making a blank front that I again played with some layouts with in PaintShopPro (or maybe I had switched to gimp by then).

unfortunatly, this is the best photo I have of the front, but I kept that design until the next computer upgrade. Overall, I got some good experiance working with a variety of materials and tools and learned some good things about computer case cooling (and bedroom light polution).