The whole case is built up from the bottom frame seen here. I built this and attached all the vertical pieces to it with glue, which wasn't the easiest way to do it as the vertical members tend to slide out of alignment slightly when they are clamped. A much better approach would be to build frames for the sides and top separately and attach them all at the end. BTW, the wood isn't bent, it's the camera lens.

After the vertical members were set in place the horizontal ones were glued in. Here it's important to note that because of the way this is all put together the polycarbonate sides will provide most of the structural support, so I opted for a quick and dirty butt joint on the framework. The whole thing is held together by the poly panels which are connected at the seams with wood.

Here you can see the radiator (the black thing on the top of the frame), which was installed permanently at this point. The whole system is cooled passively through convection, which draws air up through the warm inside of the case and out the radiator at the very top. By using the natural flow of air fans are completely eliminated. In fact, the only sound the computer makes comes from the two hard drives.

Another view of the radiator.

The frame is finished and the poly panels are going on. The method I used to attach the panels was pretty crude. I started with strips of brass cut to length, marked and drilled holes in these, then placed them over the poly while holding everything in place and drilled the holes in the brass through to the wood. I then took the brass and poly off and finished the wood holes with a smaller bit

All the slate used here was from the same big slab and it took quite a while to bust it into appropriate size chunks for the steps. The steps themselves were made by building up walls of small slate chunks around the edge of a larger piece. Silicone caulk works pretty well to hold and seal all the little pieces.

All the panels are on. The holes in the left-side panel are for the slate steps, which are attached with silicon caulk. The holes themselves were cut with a Dremel tool using one of their "rotary saw bits." Incidentally silicon caulk and poly work really well together in this application. If you coat the smooth surface with a tiny bit of oil the caulk will only stick to the rough cut edges and will peel right off the smooth surface of the panel. This is very good as the caulk tends to get all over everything. The slice seen in the side panel right under the holes is for access to the computer internals. Since the cooling water will be flowing down the slate steps it's important that the top half of the panel not move at all.

One of the heatsinks.

Here's the (almost) finished product. Not all the panels are on in these photos, but there's enough there to get the idea. I also haven't repolished all the metal yet (argh!).

The drive covers were cut from a thin piece of wood and hot-glued onto the front of the original plastic covers. All this was done by hand after tracing and eyeballing the pattern onto the back of the wood. Once the veneer is cut it helps to use an iron to heat the wood and melt the hot glue thoroughly. The only problem that I've encountered so far with these is when trying to use headphones plugged directly into the drives. The layer of wood prevents a headphone jack from being inserted fully.