View of the front panel after cleaning and reassembly of the meters.

As shown in the other picture here with the labels, I've made as many of the original buttons/knobs/meters functional as possible.

The top meter now flickers up to 100% whenever the hard drives are active. When idle, it sits around 20%. During normal use it'll be flickering all over the place, during drive-intensive use it'll sit right up at the 100% mark.

The bottom meter is hooked to a thermal resistor that I placed right alongside (touching, actually) the metal edge of the CPU itself. So, it works as a temperature meter.

Normal cool operation (40-45 Celcius) it will sit on the "0" volts, basically straight up and down. Anything over 60' C will show the needle in the "red zone."

The DVD-RW drives are opened/closed by toggling the "mod up/down" knob. Center position is "off" - toggle it up and down quickly to open the top drive, toggle it up and down again to close it. Toggle it down and back up to open the lower drive, and down and back up again to close it.

Power of course operates the power, though since ATX boards use a "momentary" switch for power, you actually have to flip the toggle up and then back down to switch it on, and again to switch off.

The power cord plugs in the front, that's of course unusual for a computer case but I wanted to keep the original look of the thing.

The reset button is the Pulse +/- switch. Toggling it over to - and then back to + "presses" the reset button.

I hid a BIOS settings clear switch behind the old cable connector for the "Output" cable. Overclockers know what I'm talking about here -- when you are goofing in the BIOS changing settings to tweak overclocking, it's pretty common to overdo something and cause the system to lock so hard it won't even boot to the BIOS, so instead of opening the case constantly to toggle the jumper, all you need to do is unscrew the cable connector for the "output" wire and then there's a small switch behind there you can press with a screwdriver, pen, whatever, to clear the BIOS.

The other knobs and things at this time do nothing, though I will install some internal lighting eventually and use the switches to control. I may also add at least one variable speed fan and use one of the knobs on the front to control it's variable resistor.

Oh -- the "Megacycles" window IS lit up when the unit is turned on, with two plain 'ol white bulbs that are the original equipment. No idea how long they'll last 'till they burnout (I'm running them at 5 volts in series, no idea what they're supposed to be...) but when they do I'll replace with dimmer LED lighting probably.

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This is a 1940's military vintage UHF Signal Generator used for testing/calibrating radio equipment. I bought this for $20 from eBay (local, no shipping) for conversion.

After gutting and cleaning (sounds like a fish) I installed a standard ATX motherboard chassis, 420 watt power supply, and mounts for drives to convert it into a complete computer case.

Why not today? Why not right now? I woke up this morning and checked a few things using my brand spankin' new Dell e6500... My CPU spun up to 100% which it had done several times in the past thanks to some of the Dell-installed utils like SMManager.exe. I looked around for the culprit but couldn't find anything fishy. "I'll do the safe shutdown and reboot - everything will be fine," or so I thought. When the box finally got through closing the open apps, finished shutting down and started going through the restart sequence, the thing blue screened right when I'd expect the Vista logo to show up. I rebooted a couple times, ran some diagnostics, ran some more diagnostics, ran the really hard-core ones that take hours... So, while my diagnostics were running, why not play a little NCAA'09 - nothing soothes like pounding some t-sips and listening to that nationally famous Fightin' Texas Aggie band play Noble Men of Kyle with every touchdown (custom stadium sounds = teh coolness)... except that a few minutes into my game, the system shutdown (black screen). "Ah man!" I rebooted the XBOX, restarted my game and a few minutes later, black screen... I called 1-800-4My-XBOX - their systems are down right now so I can't open a ticket but the guy is pretty sure I'm going to have to send it back. Great. Got a haircut, had a shower... I went back to my laptop - diagnostics all finished - nothing is wrong with the laptop according to the diagnostics. There's no temp meter I can find in the BIOS but I'm sure now that the CPU is overheating - I've let the laptop cool - we'll see later. Go back to the XBOX - it's been a few hours since I played it last. Power on - the mythical Red Ring of Death... Well, at least I know what the problem is. My XBOX got the red-ring-worm... My second one... Thank you MS for the three-year-warrantee... Starting to wonder how many times I'll get to use it. Laptop status? Man, I don't care anymore. I'm going out.