Here is a little family build we put together for my nephew who is off to his first year of college this year.  I had originally built his computer in one of my original water cooled cases, a full tower antec.  It definitely lacked flash and had a bit too much of an old school look for him.  About a year ago, we kicked around the idea of building a pc in a military ammo case.  We wanted it to be portable for lan parties, and to not look like anything other than an ammo case when it was not in use.   Earlier this summer, he called me from a local antique store with news he had located the perfect case.  Luckily for us, it happened to be a twenty percent off everything in the store day so he walked out with the case for $20.

After getting the case home, we quickly realized we would have to build a "skeleton" that all the parts would bolt to then slide the entire thing into the ammo case.  I looked around for a lian li motherboard tray but quickly realized they must have discontinued them.   I scrounged around some more and one of my friends donated an old case for us to cut up.  We were able to drill the motherboard tray out of it as well as the hard drive bay.  The next step would be to build the skeleton and make a custom back plate.

It didn't take us long to build the skeleton, my two nephews did pretty much all of the building with only minimal guidance from me.  As an added bonus, they learned how to install rivets.  After we got the skeleton built and the motherboard tray and hard drive bay mounted it was time to build the back panel.  My brother fabricated the back panel out of 1/8" thick aluminum plate.  While he was building the panel, he also cut 2 holes in the bottom of the ammo case for 80mm fans.  Side note, cutting holes in an ammo case is a real pain.

After it was all done, we slid the completed skeleton into the ammo case.  The bottom of the skeleton has four tapped holes so it can be secured with cap screws to the bottom of the case.  We added some rubber feet to the bottom to allow for airflow.  We have two 80mm fans pulling air up from the bottom, and two 60mm fans blowing air out of the top as well as the exhaust for the power supply.

Here is the hardware we used.  Pretty modest but just fine for gaming at 1280x1024 and doing school work:

EVGA 750i FTW
EVGA 8800gt Akimbo
Q6600
4GB ddr2 800 4-4-4-12
Antec 550 power supply
320gb Samsung hard drive
Windows 7 home premium 64


Anyways, here is some pics of the project, enjoy!

The original antec case:



The ammo case:



The "skeleton":





Ready to drop in the ammo case:





Installed and ready to game:

@yellow we considered blasting and painting it, but we decided to keep the original dented up and rusted look.

@steve we have 2 80s pulling cool air in from the bottom and 2 60s and the power supply exhausting hot air out the top.  Here is a pic of the bottom:



Also, we don't have the cpu or the gpu overclocked so the heat should be under control.

i may be wrong, but it looks like you don't have any feet on the bottom of the case, so those two bottom intakes aren't actually doing anything..if you get some two inch raisers, it'll give the fans breathing room and that should drop temps considerably. i may be wrong, though.

serieus

i may be wrong, but it looks like you don't have any feet on the bottom of the case, so those two bottom intakes aren't actually doing anything..if you get some two inch raisers, it'll give the fans breathing room and that should drop temps considerably. i may be wrong, though.

I took that bottom picture before we installed the feet.  We used some small square rubber feet to get the bottom up off the floor and allow for airflow. 

And thanks for the br rjohnson11! much appreciated.

I LIKE it! Pretty clever.

I like it, definitely would be pretty neat to have sitting around, perhaps for an HTPC full of war movies!

looks cool, I like it.