Dealing with a dead MAC

Jul 19, 2009

Dealing with a dead MAC

This post should actually be titled - "Discovering an amazingly complicated but incredibly fun project with a very clever, almost 13 year old friend." Unfortunately, that would not fit in the space above...

Where to begin...
The iMac was dead. It had a good life. A hand-me-down computer that had served us all faithfully, it was now kaput.

What do you do with old computers like this? We could lie and say it was in fine working order and give it to a charity. We could donate it 'as-is' and hope it finds a new job as a door stop in some senior citizen rest home. Neither seemed fitting.
We chose a more selfish end for this fine little MAC - we took it apart! Not just to say we did it but we hoped to give it a new life as something else...

We had been in a thrift shop earlier in the week and had seen a hand made clock we liked a lot. It had fruit around the clock dial and looked a little Victorian - Elise said, "Wouldn't it be fun to make a 21st century version..." That became the idea for our new project. We found a battery operated wall clock and got to work.

Now the original mother board from the iMac is a really cool clock! Amazingly enough, it keeps good time!

We still have the outside plastic case (minus the CRT (picture tube). If we can find the right size glass container, we'll be building a very cool fish tank, stay tuned!