I had a plan (honestly) that I had drawn up in the first place even before disassembly of what I wanted to achieve and rough dimensions.  My notepad soon became very overcrowded with lots of little ideas and 'to do' lists.

First job was to fit the LCD panel into a support, for this I used some 3/8" thick MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) which was the same depth as the LCD, I marked around the panel and then carefully with an electric jigsaw cut out the rectangle.  I stole Joe Willet's idea of using two pack epoxy resin to hold it in place. Amazing stuff for sure, there was a small gap all around between the lcd and the MDF, but the epoxy is very stiff and rubber like so hardly runs at all allowing a good bonding between the two.  I used the quick set stuff which allegedly dries in 10 minutes but recommends 24hours to harden fully, REALLY quick set, not! I left it till next day, there was no rush although all the time I was itching to 'do a bit more'. You can see below I was quite liberal with the glue!

I then had to MAKE a frame.  I had been to all of our local hardware stores and those that sell ready made frames but of course, not one had what I required, its a sleepy old town really.  But then again making one myself ensured I got what I wanted.  I actually bought some 1" x 5" timber, cut it down to 1" x 2" (finish) and then routed out the rebate to allow the correct depth....I thought (see next paragraph.1).  I cut it to the size I needed, I wanted a 2" mount border all the way around the LCD and this had to be even to look right.  Anyway it was mark, cut, mark, cut, mark, cut......nail, nail, nail......fix square bracket and another, and another.....make sure its square (it was) and paint satin black....let dry.....I didn't have one I had made earlier so I had to wait!

To be honest it now looks a big mess....sort it out!

The next job was to figure out where to place the motherboard.  In my 'plan' I wanted to be able to use the sound from this machine but the soundcard was MASSIVE (no....I mean HUGELY MASSIVE), I still wanted access to the jack ports too, just in case.  So I needed the motherboard to be in such a place that these ports would be exposed, I also wanted to have access to a CD or DVD ROM Drive, stupidly though I didn't have one and had to wait an agonisingly long 3 days for it to turn up...... while I was waiting I realised I would need to support the motherboard away from the LCD in case of heat problems and besides I didn't fancy fixing the motherboard to the LCD with lots of hot glue!  I was able to use a few of the old standoff holes in the motherboard to put though some screws and fix some 1/4" square pieces of timber, this seemed plenty enough gap.  (1) Ooops I didn't allow an extra 1/4" on the frame rebate for the standoff, more problem solving.

Anyway....Eventually the CDROM did turn up and as I had suspected it fell dead in line with the external jacks of the soundcard (I had deduced this already by looking at the bottom part of the laptops casing, but didn't dare fix it because of my luck....). I slotted the MDF mounted LCD into the black frame which I had precision engineered to fit (probably) and then assembled all the pieces together and aligned the CDROM and soundcard with the outer edge of the frame.  This is where I needed to fit the motherboard.

I created a few apertures to allow for the CDROM drive, soundcard, USB socket, fan output, power lead out and a power button.  It sports 4 USB points, overkill I know but it only cost £1 from Poundland and it seemed rude not to. These have already proved useful for plugging in my pen (flash) drive and now also I have one of those SD-card adapters (poundland again) that allows you to plug in an SD card which in turn plugs into a USB socket, this way I can either watch my latest pictures I have taken or transfer more across to the hard drive. I decided their needed to be some cooling and so made use of the fan that was originally in the machine, just venting it out to the side, it does very occasionally come on, but only when doing something intensive for a while. The power switch was again another idea of Joe's.  I soldered some network cable to the original power micro switch pcb, this took some forceful effort and swearing, but only because the solder they used on that switch was so hard to melt or get solder to stick to. Compaq can you please use a softer solder if such a thing exists!  I then stole......ummm 'borrowed' a micro switch from one of my kids play cameras........ahh well it was so annoying anyway "smile please....kercheeeerrrr.....FLASH' it deserved it (poundland by the way)......and soldered up the other end.   This was very easy to do really, using Joe's method of a multimeter grounded to the motherboard and then simply touching one of the other four solder points on the switch looking for a positive reading. Just solder one wire to the positive reading and one to another that doesn't give a reading, easy as pie really......if the solder isn't too hard!!! I then just glued the original plastic power switch to the frame, it has a flexible arm which allows it to push down and then spring back up.

Finally (for the reconstruction stage) I added some 1/4 " timber to the back of the frame to make up for the loss I hadn't allowed in rebating the frame (idiot) and applied a 1/8" thick plywood back panel with plenty of ventilation holes around the important parts! To add the finishing touch I had the 2" white mount professionally cut for £2 (thanks Roger at Artizan) and then added some picture frame glass to the front of it all.  I must say the whole thing looks quite alright....even if I do say so myself!

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