How To: Make a PC Chassis Braai

In the highly likely event of upgrading your PC sometime in your lifetime, you might be left with a PC chassis and its contents.

In our Christmas edition I showed you how you can turn those useless components into a festive, if somewhat gaudy, Christmas tree. But what do you do with the case? In typical South African fashion, why not have a braai?

You’ll need:

A PC Chassis

Pop rivets.

The very first thing you need to do is strip down the PC. This means taking off the front and side panels and removing everything from the interior. You ’ll be surprised at just how many things there are to take out. And don’t forget to remove the power supply.

Now you have to take apart the interior bits that hold all your hard drives, CD/ DVD drives, floppy disks, etc. The problem is that these compartments are not screwed onto the chassis, but riveted in place. This poses no problem, as you can simply drill them out using a 3.5 or 4 mm steel drill bit. You should now be left with the bare chassis and the interior compartments as two or three separate pieces.

At this point you will need to make some key design decisions, and these may vary, according to whatever you think is best really. Aesthetics aside, I went for a purely practical approach and decided that I needed the strongest possible braai I could build.

To achieve this I turned the chassis upside-down. The top of the PC became the bottom of the braai. I then drilled through the rivets holding the bottom (now the top) to the rest of the chassis, took off the plastic feet and riveted the old bottom to the one open side of chassis.

My braai then needed some supports for my braai grid. These were cunningly fashioned from the metal bits that hold your adaptor cards in place.

I then needed somewhere to put my braai tongs, salt and other paraphernalia on. The larger drive compartment was just the thing. I riveted it in place, exactly where it was, and through the same holes, but on the outside. The last thing to be done was to create a place to hold my brandy and Coke. The floppy compartment proved ideal. I then lit myself a fire and threw some boerie on the barbi.