An important thing to note: the plastic mat is part of the door locking mechanism and needs to move. After drilling holes in it to accomodate the new mounts, you'll need to enlarge them into an oval shape to accomodate the movement for opening/closing the door. If you don't do this, you won't be able to open the case easily.

After sorting that out, I was able to place the motherborad in it's "final" position. In the picture here, I still need to deal to that pillar to make the sound ports easy to use.

I had to use 3 washers for each motherboard mount point to give it some hieght, needed to clear the plastic mat. This was an issue as the CPU rentention module on my board has a base beneath the board which hit the plastic mat.

Notice I was able to find a suitable power supply that required no modification to the case. It's an AcBel 400w unit picked up from these guys.

At this point I closed the case and peared inside to measure how much room I had between the CPU and power supply. This defines how much space I have for CPU, heat sink and fan. Looks like around 15cm.

Next I'll tackle the optical drive, but first I'll need some RAM to collide with.

It became apparent pretty quick when I closed the side door that the optical drive was going to be a problem.
For starters all 4 RAM slots were obstructed, not to mention the power connector for the board. Think I could have done a better job with motherboard selection!

First I tried just lowering the drive in the case. I even cut the case to this end before realising that some of the SATA ports and a few other motherboard components would be partially obstructed.

I needed a drive that was less than 14cm, ideally 13cm. No standard drive out there at that size, not that I could fine anyway. After some further consideration I conceded that I would have to use a slim line optical drive. In doing so, I could mount it in the original position. So I cut the case for nothing! Lesson: figure out what you're going to do, before you cut steel. Not to big a deal in my case since it'll be covered by the plastics.

I opted for a slot loading drive. This makes it easier to use and I can cut the Apple plastic bezel (for zip drive) so that a CD can be inserted instead. To use a slime line drive, I also had to get an adapter as pictured, but it came cheap.

The system is almost complete (for now) in these pics. I don't yet have budget to put a decent graphics card in, so I'm going to use the onboard video for now.

Still to do:
The top plastic needs a hole cut for the blow hole fan.
The rear plastic needs a slight trim to allow easy access to the sound ports.

Other parts that went in:
AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 4800+ (the energy efficient version).
250 GB Seagate Hard disk (SATA)

I also decided to paint the door. After removing the old motherboard standoffs, i notice the metal becoming discoloured, almost rust like. A quick spray with some black enamel should give it a nice professional look too.

To the left you can see the deployment of the hard disk. I installed a firewire PCI card to enable DV capture. Only thing to watch out for is the HDD serial ATA cable. Luckily the cable that came with my drive gave the case enough room to close, but I have read you can get right-angle cables.

To the right, a photo showing some wiring and the IDE ribbon for the optical drive. You need a nice LONG ribbon for this project. If possible, use the original Apple one. Also note the power supply cable to the mainboard. I had to use two PSU extension cables joined together (note the black plastic).

Left: A closer pic of the optical drive bay. Note how much I had to cut out! The drive itself is mounted on some hard foam and secured with some silver cloth tape at the back, which you can see in the photo.

Right: Another shot of the rear panel.

I will get around to attaching the front bezels one day!

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Use the form on my contacts pages, and don't forget to include your email.