Hello everyone! Long time no see!
I have been working on this project on and off for the past few years.
This mac mini was purchased with the belief that it was an original G4 mac mini, but it was being sold as-is/for parts or not working. When it arrived, I immediately noticed the ports on the back, this was an intel mac mini. Being that you can't return as-is purchases on eBay, I decided to fix it rather than being upset. I added RAM and an SSD and it just booted up. There was nothing wrong with it that I could tell.
After I got it working, I wanted to install Snow Leopard onto it. Snow Leopard requires 2GB of RAM and this only had 512MB at the time. I bought 4GB of RAM to put in it, as I read that was the maximum. However, 2GB is the current maximum. It is possible to use 4GB, but it needs a firmware upgrade.
That's where dosdude1 comes in. He created a firmware patcher to change the 1,1 firmware to the 2,1 firmware. This allows the 4GB maximum RAM but also requires a dual core processor. I purchased the T7400 2.16GHz Core2Duo, plopped it in, installed Snow Leopard with 2GB of RAM, ran the firmware updater, and then added the other 2GB of RAM in. Now we have a fully upgraded intel mac mini.
But I wasn't done yet. I don't know what gave me the idea, but I decided to try my hand at casting resin. I made a silicone mold (for the first time ever) and mixed up some 2 part epoxy resin, with a mixture of blue and green dye trying to replicate the Bondi blue color of the original imac. Needless to say I have some learning to do. Resin leaked out of the mold at some point, so the shell was only half the height it needed to be. So after a few days, I mixed up more resin, this time I got the color wrong as well, so now with the second pour, there is an obvious line in the case. Oh well. Once that was all dry, I sanded down the case to try to remove imperfections that my mold left in the resin. Long story short, This took several pours and changing strategy to get this end result. I am happy with how this turned out, but I know I can do better in another attempt. I had many mistakes in this project but I realized them now and can produce a much better result in the next attempt. So it's not perfect but I think it looks pretty cool.
During the molding and casting process, I, an amateur, made many mistakes. I hope to revisit this and make a much better project in the future.
When I made the mold I used silicone to get the fine details on the inside of the aluminum case, that worked great, but the outside of the case mold, I made out of cardboard and box tape. This is what caused the resin to leak from the mold. It also left cardboard and tape embedded in the outside of the case, which I had to dig out and fill back in with more resin. The outside of the shell also wound up being too thick, so I had to sand and sand and sand to get the shape and thickness needed to make it look normal. Then, for the top of the case, I originally made a mold of the white part. I casted that but it was too thin and brittle. So my next idea was to tape off the green part, turn it upside down, and fill it with a layer of resin. This worked and also didn't work. The tape wasn't completely smooth, and left a wavy sticky mess on the top of the case. I had to sand that flat now and add even more resin.
Once it was flat and smooth, I added the apple logo. Which, if you weren't aware of this cool feature, the mac mini has an apple logo mold right on the bottom of it, in the rubber foot
. I put some UV resin in the apple shape, cured it, and then added it to the rest of the resin case. That looked fine but everything was still rough. I decided to paint the entire thing with a thin layer of resin to smooth everything out and get rid of the scratches from sanding. You can see evidence of where the tape was in the lid, the weird spot that reacts to light on top were formerly dents from the tape that got filled in with resin.When - yes when - I try this again, I will make a full silicone mold of the entire case. that way I can pour it one time (praying for no leaks) and it would be done the first time correctly. I think I am going to try the tangerine color next.
