Mounting new hardware in vintage hardware

[Vassilis Prevelakis]

Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at blazenet.net> wrote:
> But no drill press or serious holding hardware to do that in.
Surely you can improvise, just screw the metal bracket to a piece of
flat wooden surface (e.g. leftovers from IKEA bookcases). I also find
that its easier if you start with a very thin bit to drill a guide hole.

> One further complication is that the ones for floppies were designed to hold 
> the drive right flush up against the front panel,  while the ones for HDs 
> held it much further back,  giving better airflow.  If I *did* drill holes 
> for the purpose the HD would be much too far forward,  depending on which 
> case I was sticking it in.

Ah, yes, in that case you may want to copy a scheme that was used on
Olivetti servers. These had 10-15 5mm holes on the plastic panel sitting
in front of the drive (the thing you remove if you want to mount a tape
drive or CDROM). These provided more than adequate ventilation for the
drives which were placed just behind the panel. I have used the same trick
on a machine that had a bunch of Seagate 75Gb SCSI drives (these were
getting real hot) and it allowed sufficient cooling to let them operate
24/7 in an office environment. 

**vp