Once the decision had been made to put the uIEC into the Cardco case I had to remove the old drive mech, controller pcb and finally the power supply pcb. With the bare shell in front of me I removed the two brackets that hold the mech in place and modified them to accept the width of a normal 5.25" device, because, as anyone that has played with 1541s knows, the drive mech mount recepticles are indented, and the Cardco uses the same style mech.
That done, the next thing to decide was where will I mount the uIEC and how will I power the whole thing. As I wasn't sure of the current rating of the Cardco PSU and the fact that it looked like it was in need of some work, I decided an external power supply would be the prefered option. While looking around for something suitable in my storage cupboard I found an old external cdrom drive that had a suitably rated power supply, and, as a bonus, used a standard four pin plug with a readily available socket for its connection, bingo!!
Now that there was no internal power supply taking up space I could fit the uIEC anywhere I wanted and I decided that it would be mounted in such a way that the IEC socket on it would line up with one of the two holes in the casing originally used for the Cardco controllers IEC ports. I located the pcb in the spot, marked four holes that line up with four holes on the uIEC pcb and drilled them out. As I was going for an original look I kept the original power supply switch and fitted the four pin dc socket where the fuse holder originally went. This leaves the hole for the mains cord and one unused IEC port hole unused, i'll blank them off eventually.
Here is a picture I took of the back panel after the modifications had been performed.
More to come tomorow.
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