Chimney Clock Server

My 'wine box' fileserver was getting a bit creaky... there were no more XP updates, and IIS wasn't the most secure, so it was time to upgrade... and build stuff! By this time the 'maker' scene had really taken off and given me delusions of grandeur, so I thought I'd do things a bit differently this time around. I bought a newer, more powerful mini-itx board, more memory, and bigger hard disks. I also took advantage of the free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I was on the bleeding edge!

Even though this was a more powerful board, it was still passively cooled, but to aid the cooling I decided to build it in a 'chimney' configuration, so that warm air escaping out of the top would draw in cooler air at the bottom. My first idea was to paint it in black gloss to make it look like the alien monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey...

 ...but it was proving difficult to obtain wood in the right dimensions (1x3x9) and I also I don't have any woodworking equipment to make perfectly straight cuts, or to join pieces of wood together with any accuracy. Those problems, and the fact that it would probably need to be pretty big for anything to fit comfortably inside, kind of put the breaks on that idea.

I wondered if I could build the server into a wall clock. Not only would it look nice, but you'd be able to tell the time! However, all the lovely wall hanging ones on eBay were way too expensive to buy second hand, and I didn't relish the idea of destroying a beautiful clock by accident. I did however, discover some ready made A4 sized wooden box files, which are hinged, made specifically for you to decorate yourself, and were almost the same dimension as my original wine box server. I bought two of them and figured they'd stack up on top of each other. They looked a bit like this...

I wood-glued them together, end to end so the lids could open together, and cut a hole to allow air to flow between both boxes. I cut out two sections from the 'base' of each box with a craft knife, to allow for inflow and outflow of air. It worked a treat, but it wasn't very stable stood on the one end, so I got two cheap B&Q pine corner shelves, drilled holes in the edges for dowels, and stuck them together to create a wide semicircular base for the tower, which was glued in place.

More strips of wood were glued in place to provide airflow and support for the mini-itx board, hard disks, and I figured out a mounting scheme for the obligatory big red comedy sized power button. I temporarily used my old mini-itx board as a build template...

A cheap quartz crystal clock mechanism was built into the top lid. To protect the hands from accidental damage, a small square picture frame with a perspex window was glued to the outside. A little bit like this one...

Finally, a couple more moulded wooden strips were glued to the top and bottom of the outside of the boxes and it all had a couple of coats of wood stain, to give it a bit more of an authentic 'clock' look. I also drilled a small hole to thread the power LED light to subtly light the clock face. The hard disk light pokes out the back and illuminates the wall most effectively.

Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte J1900N-D2H quad-core 2Ghz Intel Celeron
Memory: 4Gb
Boot HD: 120Gb
Data HD: 3Tb WD Red (2.7Tb formatted)
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (free upgrade from Windows 7 Pro)

Idle temperature: 37°C
Awesomeness: Very