Maker Duncan Corridor has saved a scrapped Apple Macintosh SE’s housing from the scrapheap, turning into a contemporary sleeper construct — powered, in one other nice instance of e-waste diversion, by the heart of a Dell XPS laptop computer whose display screen had met an unlucky finish.
“In 1987, when Apple launched the Macintosh SE, it represented the leading edge of private computing,” Corridor explains of the “restomod” challenge. “With its compact all-in-one design, built-in laborious drive functionality, and that iconic beige case, the Mac SE was the pc many people dreamed of proudly owning however may by no means fairly afford. For me, that dream lingered for many years. It wasn’t till 2010 that destiny intervened within the type of a storage sale. There it was, an empty Mac SE case, particularly the M5011 ‘SuperDrive’ mannequin from 1987.”
3D-printed components — together with the rear IO defend and a intelligent digicam mount for the floppy bay — give a slick end to this Apple Mac SE sleeper construct. (📷: Duncan Corridor)
Unsurprisingly, given it was on sale for simply $10, the case was completely empty — having lengthy since misplaced its authentic innards, which might have included an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 1MB of RAM, and a 20MB or 40MB laborious drive behind the machine’s iconic 9″ monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) show, which itself sits above the machine’s twin floppy drives.
The empty shell was in poor beauty state, having been topic to an ill-advised paint job a while in its previous, however comparatively intact — and, being from the age of CRT shows, supplied loads of room for the mainboard of a scrapped Dell XPS laptop computer one a brand new 9.7″ colour flatscreen show had been inserted. The issue of recent methods having very totally different ports to these of a traditional Macintosh was resolved with slightly 3D-printing, offering a customized enter/output cowl that exposes an influence connector and change, HDMI, and USB ports.
The empty shell, purchased for simply $10, offers a comparatively spacious residence for contemporary elements. (📷: Duncan Corridor)
Different modifications made to deliver Corridor’s construct as much as spec embrace a change from mono to full stereo digital audio and a repurposing of the cut-out behind which the floppy drive lived within the authentic machine: “The place 3.5-inch diskettes as soon as supplied the first means of knowledge switch,” Corridor explains, “a 5MP [megapixel] webcam and microphone now reside in a 3D-printed enclosure. It is an ideal instance of how trendy performance will be seamlessly built-in into classic design.”
The construct is documented in full on Corridor’s web site; a separate web page offers hyperlinks to the elements used plus STL information for the 3D-printed components.
