Ingraham by Jeffrey Stephenson

Exterior continued

The grill was painted with an industrial aluminium paint that contains real aluminium paste in its formula. The footer is a separate wooden structure made up of 18 pieces of wood. I painted it gloss black and secured it with screws to the bottom of the case. I finished Ingraham’s walnut woodwork with 10 coats of brush-on satin lacquer.

Each coat was sanded with increasingly finer grades of sandpaper. The final coat was buffed with #0000 steel wool, the finest grade of steel wool. The finish is maintained periodically with a coat of Johnson’s Paste Wax.


For case ventilation I went with a PCI slot blower instead of a conventional axial fan. The blower let me use a PCI slot for the fan exhaust instead of having to cut a hole in the case for a standard fan. An odd characteristic of the Silverstone LC06 is that it is fanless and has no provisions to mount a case fan. Slot blowers are notorious for being much louder than regular fans.


To offset this I mounted a rheostat controller with a large knurled knob to the back of the case to control the blower’s speed. The blower sits at the top of the case interior so it can exhaust hot air while pulling in fresh air through the case’s two vent ports in the grill.


I built a fairly large wooden bracket for the blower to hold it in place during shipping. A PCI slot blower is normally mounted to the case with just a single PCI slot screw. That setup just wasn’t going to survive a trip across town.