BOSS: FX57 by TechDaddy

Mighty Mouse

Ok, so it is not quite the end, but it is pretty dang close! I needed a mouse and a keyboard to go with this awesome beast. So, I blew the dust off my tools of ignorance, and went to work on a team of input devices that could keep up with this ground pounding tribute to horsepower. Using a Saitek keyboard and a Sunbeam mouse, I went to town. I immediately went to work on the mouse and popped the screws out of it and began stripping it down.


This mouse would be 2 tone, just like the mod. The palm rest and finger buttons would be OSHA orange, and the center piece and the lower side vent/support sections would be Duplicolor Metalcast Smoke. To keep the reflectivity of the shiny, chrome looking parts, I used a clear adhesion promoter instead of opaque primer, and used regular white primer on the red parts (after lightly sanding their surface to scuff them up a bit). The Smoke paint required 3-4 coats to acheieve the darkness that I wanted from the part, and the orange buttons and palm rest needed to be sanded down in places where the buttons moved through.

Paint adds to the thickness of parts, and when you are dealing with the tight tolerances of pre-cast plastic buttons on mice, you dont have a lot of space to begin with. So, I had to sand/file down the parts that were rubbing, then paint them again so that the space taken up by the painted part was equivalent to the unpainted part. that way, the mouse works just as it should!

Within the mouse was a blue 5mm LED that I swapped for a white one and the wheel for the mouse was a clear rubber. I wanted that surround on the mouse wheel to look like a car tyre, so I popped it off and boiled some water. I let the water sit for a few minutes to cool just a bit, then I dumped in a 1/2 package of black clothing dye. Mixed that up nicely, and dropped the rubber surround into the dye water bath. I left it there for probably 20 minutes, long enough for the water to completely cool. The surround became a "black tire" without any warping or melting (I was very fearful of melting this one). Reassembled the mouse, and had something special.