Slimline Disc and Drawer unit for PC by Cargy

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

Now I know you're gonna tell me that hardly anyone uses optical drives any more. But I still do! Only occasionally, it's true! But I still like the convenience of simply opening a tray and whacking in a disc when needed, rather than having to dig a portable unit out of a cupboard, find all the right leads, and then trying to prop it somewhere stable whilst in use.
My existing drive allowed me to play CDs and DVDs if I wanted (rarely!) but, since a remodelling a few years back, I had no means to play Bluray media on my living room TV.
Despite their approaching obsolescence, full size Bluray drives still command a disproportionately large price compared to DVD drives. So, with this in mind, I acquired a used Bluray burner taken from an old laptop (for the princely sum of £18!), and started thinking sbout how I would incorporate this into the drive bay in place of the existing DVD burner.
You may have noticed that my PC case is from a branded, off-the-shelf, mid-2000s, home PC. The innards are actually far more state of the art than this, but I enjoy the fact that it looks somewhat archaic and obsolete. In common with PCs of the time, it's equipped with two 5.25" drive bays - something that's getting rarer each passing day. Last year I repurposed one of the bays into a drawer for storing memory cards, thumb drives, etc (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4047973). But I quickly realised the "new" drive would free up even more storage space that could be put to good use in taming my ever-expanding collection of these things.
Taking my previous drawer design as a starting point, it was no great effort to reduce the size of the cage and drawer to provide room for the new drive and, with a little bit of measuring and experimenting, graft a drive mounting on the top.
On my previous drawer design I had issues with the prototype's cage holes mis-aligning with the frame in my PC case. Whether the PC case was just distorted, or I messed up somehow, I could never get more than 3 bolts into the frame. Another minor issue was that the cage walls were a bit too thin to take a normal length drive retaining bolt without snagging on the drawer.
So on this design I deliberately chose to omit any set fixing points, and gave the bracket thicker walls, with the holes to be drilled with the cage in situ. The fixing bolts then cut their own threads as they were screwed into place.
Experience had also taught me that having dividers in the drawer would make finding things easier. So the new drawer was split into an arbitrary set of partitions that I hope will be suitable for my needs.
One of the unforeseen problems of using an ex-laptop drive was that the front fascia was custom-shaped to match the body of whatever machine it came from (in my case, a Sony Vaio machine). Fortunately all the drive bodies are standard, and I was simply able to source a new flat fascia, from eBay, for the ludicrously cheap sum of £2.45 delivered. Not only was it astonishingly cheap, but it arrived at my door, all the way from China, within 7 days. I've routinely ordered stuff from the UK that has taken longer than this to arrive! Full marks to the seller and the postal services involved.
In terms of printing, I placed the main cage on its open end, with the angled piece at the bottom, tapering upwards. Doing it this way, no support was needed.
The drawer tray prints fine as is. But there are two possible orientations for the drawer front: Print it with the drawer-pull flat on the buildplate, and no support is necessary.
But I wanted to use ironing to smooth out the layer lines. So printed mine on its back, using tree support where needed. The latter required a little post-printing clean up, but that's a small price to pay to reduce the layer lines on the finished article.
I'm very pleased with the result. It doesn't look out of place, it provides some organised storage for my media collection, and the PC now allows me to play Blurays without the hassle of plugging in an external drive.
I usually reserve this last paragraph for a closing pun - Something like "thus this description drawers to a close". But, to be honest, I couldn't think of one.
Happy 3D printing to you all!