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Beautiful Wooden PC Cases
mrbill submitted linkage to a site offering to sell what appear to be very beautiful wood PC cases combining wood, glass and silicon into something a hell of a lot prettier than that beige box. Something tells me these wouldn't win the recent Intel sexy case contest, but they sure are sharp.
Back before I had a couple little kids, I pulled in my dad and his milling machine to make the Fossil computer. It's brass and wood, with a neat fossil as a badge.
It's now my daughter's computer, so it plays more Dora the Explorer than the latest high-end games. When I replace my main computer, I'll gut it and put in fancy new components. The main draw is that it's silent, with the main issue being heat (I have some big, slow fans to help with that).
As I have pondered doing this, I had concerns about the humidity level of the wood going up and down as the case got hot, then cold, then hot again. I wondered if this would eventually crack or split the wood. What is the longevity? Is his choice of woods helpful in this regard? My chioce would have been ceder, what a great smelling computer, but it is very prone to splitting, and covering that wood on both sides with laquer would be pointless if you wanted to enjoy the smell. Maybe my fears were unfounded.....
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Of course it also includes a trial of WinRAR, but it is progress.If you live somewhere with easy access to cheap and skillful carpenters(e.g Egypt), you can kick the collective bottom of these cases. $35000? I'm in Egypt at the moment, and for $35000 I could buy a beautiful Arabesque case and the carpenter and his dog.
1) Go with carpenter to select wood from source provider
2) Agree on external chassis specs
3) Argue for 15 min on price
4) $200, and you're robbing yourself
5) hammers and splinters and...
6) Profit!
A $100K violin is worth more than the wood it's made out of :-)
(I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out other perspectives since the quality of the violin is more than just what it's made of)
Heat is not a problem on these cases IMHO
quoted from their webpage's specs section:
" Thermaltake Big Water SE Liquid Cooling System
Thermaltake Aquarius VGA Water Block
500cc bottle of UV sensitive high performance coolant and filler syringe"
evisceration by a thousand branches of a mighty oak!
I've seen something like this before, in a cigar humidor. I think I like it much better than these monstrosities.
u midor_description.html
here's a picture of the humidor: http://images10.newegg.com/UploadFilesForNewegg/h
- James
"...and why do the latest mobile phones cost so much then drop price so rapidly 18 months later? the transistors cost the same amount to produce"
Um, no they don't. Your argument leaves out a couple things. First there are one-time start-up costs that needs to be dispensed with, and the manufacturer is going to try to get rid of them as soon as possible. Second there's process improvements over the lifecycle of a product. The product gets made cheaper and better maybe by using a new injection molding technique on the cases for example. Or the circuit board layout is improved through consolidation, or a more efficient design. The materials can change. The outside appearance and fuctionality can stay the same, but not the insides or the process used to create them.
"How much it's worth might be closer to thinking about the craftsman's hourly rate and thinking about how many hours work is in there, and double whatever you come up with to allow for workshop costs etc."
Apparently your market doesn't have the concept of R&D. Nor the idea that a company needs a certain amount to even out the bumps in it's market. e.g. savings. Let alone it's future obligations. e.g. employee retirement. Being in business isn't about break-even.
Someone in that other room is looking at it though.
I agree that computers shouldn't need to look extraordinary, and if anything, should try to be unseen.
That is exactly what some of these wooden cases do, they mask the PC behind a nice wooden cover, designed to look like a table, or decorative piece, or other piece of furniture.
One of the best home mod wooden pc cases I have seen was for a media center, and it was actually built into some sort of nice looking wooden table (perhaps an old sewing table where the sewing machine drops down into the table) which also became the tv stand for which the media pc was being used.