The K'nexintosh 8100

by Jason Anderson

The idea for the K'nexintosh started in Applefritter Forums when a poster named K-hack posted his PC which he had encased in K'nex. We discussed it and I decided to create my own from a Macintosh. I started with a Macintosh IIci, but the design didn't work. So when I recieved an 8100, I realized it would make a much better K'nexintosh...

It wasn't that hard to build and I had a bunch of K'nex so I started out. I started with the Mother Board support and then base and built upwards from there creating shelves for the HD's and then Floppy while leaving room for the PDS video card. (Which I don't use, but it's there in case. I guess I could remove it and get a G3 card, but why bother? I don't want melted K'nex.) Then topped it off and put the CD drive on top and boxed it in.

I tried a few ideas at first and tried to place a 40MB SCSI Removable drive in there, but unfortunately after all the work getting the SCSI cables to reach it turned out the drivers conflicted with OS 9, so I bagged that idea and stuck to only one drive on top. The 8100 has two SCSI busses. One contains the two 1.88 GB IBM 1.5" thick HD's (You can see the SCSI cable hanging down in that shot) and the other is for the CD (And maybe in the future whatever other drive I find). The HD's have a problem where if they even TOUCH metal they short out. And since the space between the connectors on the ribbon cable are EXACTLY the thickness of the HD's I have to keep them separated with a yellow rod.

This is the left. You can see the Power Source here. It's big. You'll also notice the HD's and long SCSI cable.

Here's the back! Layed out about the same as the original case, but still easier to open. Nothing interesting here. Only that it was lucky that the grey connector went between the monitor port and Serial port so well.

Here is the right side. This is where the MotherBoard is. You can see the HD's and Floppy on the left, the CD and speaker on top. And the wire and power LED above the Floppy.

One final shot. The top. There's the speaker and the original AppleCD 300i CD drive.

You'd think having a case made of K'nex it'd be easy to upgrade or swap out parts, but it's not. It seems every time I take a part out, the case goes back together with extra pieces left over..