[Beowulf] Cases for DIY boxen

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Peter St. John wrote:

> On the subject of Doug's "A Case for Cases"
> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7164, I had noticed that the Helmer thing
> ("bewwulf in an Ikea cabinet") is not
> really in a wood cabinet (the steel box can be put inside a cabinet). I'm
> assuming it's unreasonable to actually make a wood cabinet? On account of
> humidy, or just weight? To me it just sounds easy to build a wooden rack for
> a bunch of ATX motherboards. And it could look nice. Thermal and electrical
> insulation would be OK, and humidy controlled with a good paint job on the
> interior...?

What about fire?  Anything electrical can in a worst case pop hot/molten
metal before frying and/or blowing a breaker.  Capacitors blow up
(literally).  A wire is badly soldered and pulls free and grounds out,
spattering white hot metal.

Inside a metal shell, odds are you won't get a REAL fire as there isn't
much actively flammable around.  In a wooden box, carefully dried by six
months of 50C heat... it wouldn't take a lot to get real flames,
especially if the box had e.g. a cooling fan mounted to actively fan a
hot coal into flames.

    rgb

>
> Peter
>

-- 
Robert G. Brown                            Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
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