Post your "Ghetto Mod" pics

  • Thread starter Deleted member 96510
  • Start date
Dead cell on an evoo laptop. Bought on ebay for $50. Couldn't find a replacement anywhere to my dismay. Bought an equivalent voltage battery on ebay (a $10 dell battery), soldered off and replaced the dead cell. Charged voltage isn't equal between the 2 yet, mostly due to one being over charged and the other not quite so. I’m still working out kinks, but it can survive an accidental unplug now at least.

Edit: It’s better lasting now that it’s gone through some short charge cycles. I’m probably going to continue to have some issues at least because the stock was a total of 38000 mwh and the dell is a 34000 set. So that means it’s 2000 less and that will probably mean unequal discharge. Windows sees less the the stock 38000 after a few shut downs on battery and an uninstall a few times. Still not throwing any errors which I kind of expected. Idk. For a laptop that's used for kids schooling at home, being able to survive the power plug slip up is worth the $10.

edit2: handful of cycles later and I'm able to make it through a tv show and still have time 89% and it still nut cutting off. woo!
 

Attachments

  • IMG_20200502_194557.jpg
    IMG_20200502_194557.jpg
    501.4 KB · Views: 0
  • IMG_20200502_194642.jpg
    IMG_20200502_194642.jpg
    461.1 KB · Views: 0
Last edited:
20200504_011336.jpg
Here's my recent ghetto cooling mod on my lowly Dell Optiplex. I have a single slot AMD R7 450 GPU that runs pretty warm due to it's lame tiny cooler, so I drilled some holes in the bottom of the case and mounted a Rosewill 120mm fan to the case with random hardware I found in my shed. Dropped GPU temps apx 10C while gaming, so mod worked and was worth doing lol.
 
Last edited:
Stole my pic from the Distributed Computing section.

Was running 2 PSUs with paper clips because I didn't have the adapter and the local shop didn't have a replacement PSU for the DOA they sold me. Did this so I could try running it ~50% until I got a good PSU.. Ended up breaking this one too when I tried loading it up with RAM. It wouldn't even complete a boot up before shutting down. The OS SSD and one of the PSUs eventually stopped working in "Dual Mode".. Shocker, it was a 300W and a 400W.
1590824348130.png
 
Stole my pic from the Distributed Computing section.

Was running 2 PSUs with paper clips because I didn't have the adapter and the local shop didn't have a replacement PSU for the DOA they sold me. Did this so I could try running it ~50% until I got a good PSU.. Ended up breaking this one too when I tried loading it up with RAM. It wouldn't even complete a boot up before shutting down. The OS SSD and one of the PSUs eventually stopped working in "Dual Mode".. Shocker, it was a 300W and a 400W.
View attachment 249172

Using aluminum extrusions = instant failure. This is too rich for this thread :U
 
Last edited:
It's the year of the nasty 2020.
I bought a used Dell 3008WFP for $80. Previous owner didn't know it could do 2650x1600 with DP. I did.

Few days in, it starts doing some lines on the screen flickering all over the place. Took it to garage, blew it out with compressor and strapped a USB fan to it.

image0.jpg


Issue resolved. It was most likely the dust, but the fan is also sucking hot air out of this space heater.
 
I have that modem/router, but use it bridge mode. Does it run hot?
I have it in bridge mode as well, it gets pretty toasty. Maybe it's defective in some way because even with the fan it's really toasty on the sides.
 
what do you have it sitting on? its venting heat into it.
Cable card tuner, it doesn't really put off much heat. It's fine by itself, but they don't make them anymore and my mom uses it every day so I put the cable modem on top to suck the air through it to hopefully make it last a little longer. Cable modem is hot no matter where it is. The fan is on suck not blow.
 
Cable card tuner, it doesn't really put off much heat. It's fine by itself, but they don't make them anymore and my mom uses it every day so I put the cable modem on top to suck the air through it to hopefully make it last a little longer. Cable modem is hot no matter where it is. The fan is on suck not blow.
stick some taller feet on the bottom of the router, should help.
 
I don't know how I forgot to post this months ago but I was designing/building a new open-air case for my living room PC and I kind of got sidetracked building a guitar, among other things, and this is how my living room PC has sat for way too long.

Ryzen 3600, 32gb of something rgb and a 1080 ti all in a "temporary" loop of some spare parts and attached to the external radiator from my last living room build that was in a Phanteks Shift. The HX1000 is actually from one of Kyles' old machines that I picked up at one of the GenMay storage facility meets and despite being covered in coolant it has chugged right along for years.

1598244467932.png
 
1. Old 80mm fan to cool the cable modem.
2. Modem placed on top of cable tuner to pull heat out of it. Don't have to have two fans now.
3. Molex connector is soldered into a usb cable and plugged in front of the computer.
4. Scotch tape holding the fan on.
 
1. Old 80mm fan to cool the cable modem.
2. Modem placed on top of cable tuner to pull heat out of it. Don't have to have two fans now.
3. Molex connector is soldered into a usb cable and plugged in front of the computer.
4. Scotch tape holding the fan on.
Thank you 🙂
 
Using a laptop heatpipe cooler to remotely cool an AMD K6/2 400 on an interposer that's too tall to let the fan breathe. Since there's obviously no way of clamping it down, it was epoxied to the top of the IHS and the blower was hot glued to the case. The heatpipe assembly came from some ASUS gaming laptop designed to cool an i7, so it's more than enough for this CPU. I had to carefully bend the heatpipes to sweep down and go under the drive cage. It also required relocating a capacitor to the backside of the board folded at a 90 degree angle to fit in that location.

ajlI9Qo.jpg

Here's the original cooling:

vlNKCvL.jpg

The card above it is a 12-13" PCI compatibility board with a video/audio daughterboard sandwiched to it. Because of the layout inside the case, it can only go in the slot it's installed in.

View with everything installed again. The old blow down fan was repurposed as a RAM/VRM cooler and a support for the long PCI card.
ijTnQhw.jpg
 
Last edited:
Using a laptop heatpipe cooler to remotely cool an AMD K6/2 400 on an interposer that's too tall to let the fan breathe. Since there's obviously no way of clamping it down, it was epoxied to the top of the IHS and the blower was hot glued to the case. The heatpipe assembly came from some ASUS gaming laptop designed to cool an i7, so it's more than enough for this CPU. I had to carefully bend the heatpipes to sweep down and go under the drive cage. It also required relocating a capacitor to the backside of the board folded at a 90 degree angle to fit in that location.

View attachment 360805

Here's the original cooling:

View attachment 360806

The card above it is a 12-13" PCI compatibility board with a video/audio daughterboard sandwiched to it. Because of the layout inside the case, it can only go in the slot it's installed in.

View with everything installed again. The old blow down fan was repurposed as a RAM/VRM cooler and a support for the long PCI card.
View attachment 360808
lol, thats awesome!

+5 food stamps for using duct tape.
 
Using a laptop heatpipe cooler to remotely cool an AMD K6/2 400 on an interposer that's too tall to let the fan breathe. Since there's obviously no way of clamping it down, it was epoxied to the top of the IHS and the blower was hot glued to the case. The heatpipe assembly came from some ASUS gaming laptop designed to cool an i7, so it's more than enough for this CPU. I had to carefully bend the heatpipes to sweep down and go under the drive cage. It also required relocating a capacitor to the backside of the board folded at a 90 degree angle to fit in that location.

View attachment 360805

Here's the original cooling:

View attachment 360806

The card above it is a 12-13" PCI compatibility board with a video/audio daughterboard sandwiched to it. Because of the layout inside the case, it can only go in the slot it's installed in.

View with everything installed again. The old blow down fan was repurposed as a RAM/VRM cooler and a support for the long PCI card.
View attachment 360808
tenor.gif



I admire the creativity and resourcefulness.
 
That's the sprinkles on top, man.

Pfft, that was easy. Backporting the Antec SL-350 ATX power supply to AT with a P8/P9 harness and a soft start header was the bigger headache.

The 60mm ASUS fan is also an addition, I had to dremel a hole in the case for it.

And 291 capacitors being replaced. I thought it would never end..
 
AT? what is this thing GiG?

Belongs to a customer of mine, it's an FMVTowns with an FMTowns compatibility board on it, which is basically a 386DX-40 SBC on a PCI card. It works a bit differently than a normal SBC though, the motherboard is custom and has a special ribbon cable that routes the IRQs and some CPU signals to the compatibility board so it can inject itself into the host motherboard and use its resources. In FMTowns mode, the SBC makes use of the ISA and PCI buses, as well as the hard disk controller. It has its own video output, which works very much like the 3dfx Voodoo1 and 2 with a VGA passthrough cable.

My customer obviously had decked it out with maxed out RAM and the CPU interposer, which allows use of an AMD K6/2 400 over the original board limit of a Pentium 166. The original PSU was grossly overloaded and causing system instability, hence the modifying an ATX PSU to work in its place. But it had to be that specific Antec PSU because the machine needs the -5v rail. I also had to recap <everything> except the motherboard because I ran into some weird problems with it. I did replace all of the important ones around the CPU socket though, hence why they're all red. They're all high quality polymer caps that can take the heat and will last for a long time. The three caps on the interposer VRM were also VERY bad and pissing out electrolyte everywhere, these were also replaced with polymer caps.
 
That project would have made Adrian Black level content, something to think about...
 
That project would have made Adrian Black level content, something to think about...
Lmao, I don't think people are interested in watching me spend hours at a bench replacing capacitors. I have a couple of videos repairing boards and they didn't even break 50 views a piece. While the videos on my truck got thousands.
 
pendragon1 taco dont see any ghetto? What am I looking at? So confused!
i admit, its not the most ghetto but i needed to cover the white plastic couplers. so i cut short lengths of the fuel line i used and then cut them lengthwise to slide over the coupler for camo.
and some would say tying an aio block into a custom loop is ghetto....
 
Not really a computer, but it cools my computers.

My 14 year old Lasko box fan died, the motor burned up from a locked up bearing. Normally I can re-bearing the motor, but the heat cooked the windings and shorted it out. Went too long between servicing the motor, those sleeve bearings need oil added to them every so often.

Lasko supports right to repair, and they'll sell you everything to repair your fan - except for the damn motor, which is the number one failure in those fans because they're cheap chineseium crap with sleeve bearings that have no oil port. You have to take the motor apart to oil them.

My horde is both a curse and a blessing, this time it saved me from having to throw the thing out. I had three Speco platter motors from another lifetime ago when I was a film projectionist. Turns out they had the same shaft size and keying as the Lasko motor. Problem is that they're not the same size, and they're DC motors, not AC. Nothing a bit of hackery can solve.

The planets must have been in alignment because the front half of the dead motor was just slightly bigger in diameter than the Speco motor. So some dremeling to remove some screw holes and electrical tape around the Speco motor made it fit. Then two long screws to attach the Speco motor to the old motor front case half. No need to make custom brackets!

Next issue was the fact the Speco motor was DC. I'm glad I looked at the information plate before I sent 'er with mains, that would have been super spicy. I had a spare boost converter from an old project that got up to 35v, which was more than enough for the fan. Reused the original knob switch and just wired it to "3" and the original wire out of the fan. Chopped the plug off and put a barrel connector to a 12v 5a power brick I recycled from some old Google Fiber modem and voila, a working fan again.

 
Not really a computer, but it cools my computers.

My 14 year old Lasko box fan died, the motor burned up from a locked up bearing. Normally I can re-bearing the motor, but the heat cooked the windings and shorted it out. Went too long between servicing the motor, those sleeve bearings need oil added to them every so often.

Lasko supports right to repair, and they'll sell you everything to repair your fan - except for the damn motor, which is the number one failure in those fans because they're cheap chineseium crap with sleeve bearings that have no oil port. You have to take the motor apart to oil them.

My horde is both a curse and a blessing, this time it saved me from having to throw the thing out. I had three Speco platter motors from another lifetime ago when I was a film projectionist. Turns out they had the same shaft size and keying as the Lasko motor. Problem is that they're not the same size, and they're DC motors, not AC. Nothing a bit of hackery can solve.

The planets must have been in alignment because the front half of the dead motor was just slightly bigger in diameter than the Speco motor. So some dremeling to remove some screw holes and electrical tape around the Speco motor made it fit. Then two long screws to attach the Speco motor to the old motor front case half. No need to make custom brackets!

Next issue was the fact the Speco motor was DC. I'm glad I looked at the information plate before I sent 'er with mains, that would have been super spicy. I had a spare boost converter from an old project that got up to 35v, which was more than enough for the fan. Reused the original knob switch and just wired it to "3" and the original wire out of the fan. Chopped the plug off and put a barrel connector to a 12v 5a power brick I recycled from some old Google Fiber modem and voila, a working fan again.



I'm curious. If this was running for 14 years wtf did you attach it too LOL
 
Are you sure the windings are burned out, or could it be a thermal fuse blowing? I ask, because I've repaired multiple fans with burned thermal fuses, it's a fairly straightforward repair (and you can replace the one-shot fuse with a resettable fuse), and you are clearly somewhat handy...
 
I fixed a coffee grinder that way, fuse nestled inside the motor right at the winding, thing ran for years after that.
 
Are you sure the windings are burned out, or could it be a thermal fuse blowing? I ask, because I've repaired multiple fans with burned thermal fuses, it's a fairly straightforward repair (and you can replace the one-shot fuse with a resettable fuse), and you are clearly somewhat handy...

Yes, very sure the windings were burnt. There were black spots where the lacquer had burned from the windings shorting together. Also, the zip ties were melted and brown and the winding rope used to tie the windings out of the way were singed. It also had the electrical smell of death.

Motor got VERY hot. Insulation on the windings was compromised, it would have had to be completely rewound. Since copper is hideously expensive, and I don't have a winding machine anyway, motor got scrapped. It would have cost well over $200 to rewind a crappy failed Chinese motor, before even getting to the bearings being shot. The spun bearing in the front case half was going to be a chore to fix by itself.
 
Back
Top