A while ago now some bright spark came up with the idea of hiding the fronts of their CD drives by using the blanking plates that came with their case, it didnt take long for the idea to catch and now it seems like a case mod isnt complete without having stealthed drives ...

The basic premise to achieve this is incredibly simple; essentially you take a case fascia, remove the part that would normally attach it to the case and proceed to fix it to the tray of the CD drive. That said there are a number of things to be aware of when carrying this out which I'll do my best to cover below.

In the pictures below you can see basically what we're trying to achieve, both the finihed DVD drive and below it the CD-RW waiting to be tackled. The first step is to remove any existing front to the drive that might get in the way, in my case the Ricoh CD-RW had a drop down flap in front of the tray so I ended up having to remove the entire fascia. In the case of the DVD however the tray was showing from the outside so I could simply stick the case fascia straight on to it. Basically how you handle this stage depends very much on the make of drive but what youre looking for is a flat(ish), unrestricted surface. If you do have to remove the fascia however its often a case of simply loosening a couple of tabs around the front and pulling it off .. theres no need to get involved with the insides of the drive.

Once the drive itself is ready its time to look at a couple of important features, firstly the eject button. In order that we can still open the drive when not in windows we'll be attaching something to the inside of the fascia to press the button so its important to know how big it needs to be and where to place it. Similarly its a good idea to get a rough estimate of how far the drive is from the front of the case to see how far forward the fascia will need to sit or whether the drive itself will need recessing. Below you can see the button at the bottom right of the drive slot and also the metal corner braces which I'll be making use of later.

On to the fascia itself and you can see the original (right) and cut-down version (left) to get an idea of what needs to be done. Using a simple hacksaw blade its insanely easy to hack through the side part that would normally fix it to an empty drive bay, for neatness I cut it to leave the sides a uniform height all the way around.

Now comes the only tricky bit of the project, preparing the fascia to fit the drive. As most cases and drives will differ I'm just going to describe what I did for mine but the principles are the same regardless. The first problem is making sure it will sit at the right distance from the drive so as to be level with the front of the case, for this I simply used some cardboard and attached it the inside with masking tape. This wasnt ideal but was sufficient to generate the height and was the only thing I had available so it had to do!! Next up came the actual fixing for which I used blu-tak as it was non-permanent, flexible yet still more than strong enough to support the weight of the fascia, the only thing to pay attention to here is to make sure you prepare these to be at the right height to fix to the drive. The last stage before sticking it on is to attach something to hover over or rest on the eject button of the tray so that when you tap that area on the outside the drive will open. This is where the flexibility of the blu-tak and the cardboard actually came into their own as they allowed a certain amount of leeway so the blank cantridge (below) rests on the button without actually pressing it. The thumbscrew is there to support the other side of the fascia at the bottom and rests on the corner brace mentioned above. While not strickly neccessary it does however prevent the front pivoting around its fixing and helps keep it flush with the case.

Here you can see the tray has two raised parts on the front which I made sure the blu-tak would be in-line with.

Finally its simply a case of pressuring the fascia on to the drive, this best done with the drive closed so as to get it in the right place. Like me you'll probably need to make a few small adjustments to stop the drive catching on the surround on its way in and out and is certainly where the blu-tak has an advantage over a more permanent method.

All being well a little tap at the bottom right corner (above) and voila...

The finished article ... totally undecernable from the outside and best of all - NO MORE BEIGE !!!

Thats really all there is to it, you wont need a lot of money or skill to be able to carry this out and nearly every case will reap the benefits. Good luck !!

Don't forget to check out the forums!!