Deal of the year!

Just scored an M15x off eBay. $31AUD (~$20USD) plus postage.
The seller says the charger snapped off and got stuck in the charge port but I’m assuming the charge port itself is broken so I’ll probably have to learn how to solder a new one in. Battery is dead too.
It has the 920XM and 260M.



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$50 for a m15x?! Even if it´s not working right now, that a great deal.

 

Yeah I reckon he’s pissed he didn’t put $250-300 on it because someone would have grabbed it for that.
Hopefully it’s an easy fix. It will need a new battery at the very least.
I have a 7970M laying around that I’ll try to get working in it.


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there was a M18X R1 for $115 USD plus $37 shipping ... I didn’t bother to buy it lol.

 

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hahahah man ... I got too many junk already . Plus , I’m not a fan of the R1.

 

Still, it’s a pretty good deal even just for parts.

Well I got the M15x today and just like I thought it’s a broken charge port. I’ve pulled the motherboard out to see how hard it would be to install a new port. My soldering skills are weak so it may be easier to get a ‘working’ board off AliExpress for $95AUD and hope for the best.
I can grab a charge port for $10 later and practice.


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I sense an impending terrific paint job!

 

Hopefully!!!
I ordered a new power jack in the hope that I could try my hand at desoldering/resoldering but I soon discovered that it was a skill I do not possess and may never possess. I found a local guy who does it and he'd do it for $50 if I supplied the jack and pulled the board. I had already pulled the board so I just have to wait a few weeks for the jack to come in. If it all goes to plan then I've spent $100AUD ($67USD) on the machine. I can only hope it works like the seller said it did before he broke the jack.

Once all this is sorted then it's paint time!

I'm still in the process of respraying my second M18x gloss white. I was all set to put the last few coats of clear on the LCD lid last night but as I was cleaning it before spraying, I dropped it and made a 2mm chip in the paint....... I almost frisbee'd the thing over the fence! I had to sand the section back to metal and hopefully I can blend the paint so you can't see the chip, but it will be difficult.
Lesson learned; Do not drink red wine while working on laptops.

 

I got drunk last saturday night and put a bid in on an M17x R4 that was working but had random BSOD crashes. I've been waiting 5 days for someone to hopefully outbid me but I just won it. I guess I have another project on my hands.
If you never hear from me again it because my wife has strangled me.

 

How is the project going? Or should we all prepare for mourning?

Inspired by your projects I have undertaken my own, hopefully this week I will have some time to assemble, M15XR2 with colour tones of metallic/diamond/glitter aquamarine and all the plastic parts (bottom cover, battery, palmrest, and so on) with metallic spray rubber. So far it wasn't an easy job (no chemical I've tried bites the paint off the machine, by testing ortophosporous acid aluminium started bubbling but the paint stayed where it was), and it's got plenty of imperfections, but I'm hopeful.

Care to share any tips? How to get a glossy finish? Mine will probably end a little rough, but I've got a few more M15XR2 cases to work with

 

Got bad news today. I took the board and a new power jack into a repair guy last week and today he said that he soldered the new jack in but when he tested the board there was a short somewhere. He tried a few times but it kept shorting out. Looks like I have to buy a new board and hope that everything works when I throw it in the machine.
It was about $95AUD for a new board but I thought the guy would be able to put the new jack in so I went with that option. Now I’m down $60 and still have to buy the new board. Not sure what to do now.


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Sorry to hear that man, I once gave my old 6990M to a repair shop and they fried it. Must have gone gung ho with the hot air soldering station...I got a dodo back...never again!

The only half decent thing was they didn't charge me for attempting repair, did they charge you?

What you could do is visually inspect the quality of their soldering job, they may have bridged some pins and that's what's causing the short?

 

Yeah he’s going to charge me $50.

He said he was worried he may have bridged the pins so he removed the jack and started again and even put it under the microscope to double check. It was still shorting out.
The previous owner said it was working fine until the jack was broken but you never really know. I’ll have to take a gamble on an Aliexpress board and hope for the best.


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I won’t start respraying it until I know it’s all working. I’ll probably go gloss white or matte black.


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Make sure you prep the old surface well. I’ve been having issues with an M18x I’ve been working on. When I get to the clear coat stage it keeps breaking out in orange peel cracking in one particular spot. I’m assuming I didn’t prep before the base coat properly. I’ll have to strip it down to the original coat for the second time and start again. I’ve bought some grease and wax remover this time to make sure the original anodised aluminum is clean before the primer goes on.
I use a gloss white plus gloss clear coat but it really needs a heavy coat of clear at the end to get a strong gloss finish. Keeping trash out of it during the process is hard. Lots of wet sanding with 2000 grit paper needed.



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Good to know. For polishing I've been using very fine steel wool. but for this undertaking I will take whatever I can get. Need to get a proper professional kiddie tent to make an overpressure chamber to get dust away, but unfortunately spare time is limited.

 

Yeah it would be nice to have a better setup to keep the area free from crap in the air. I've been using a beach sun tent but it's not quite up for the task. I was doodling some plans yesterday for a small spray booth/box.
What are your plans for that M18x R2 in your signature?

 

For now? Getting it to run, currently waiting for the eeprom flasher, should be here any hour now. As soon as the problems are fixed, I dunno, I'm split between hydrographics (some sort of carbon fiber pattern or something), RAPTOR Coating paint (the colour may vary) and, since I'm a sucker for the '80s, wicked green lemon of a Lamborghini Diablo It will look a lot faster Another silly idea came to me when visiting a supermarket I saw a stone/granite effect paint, and since it weights around 5-6kg without all the parts it would be quite fitting A friend of my coined a nickname for my M15xR2 - ODRA, after Polish computers from the sixties-seventies, being the size of a large wardrobe, and operated on punchcards I do believe it is quite fitting, since my 'office' bag weights now, with spare battery, PSU, external keyboard, trackball, cooling stand, extension cord and so on, around 15kg

For now don't have much scratch lying around to buy some hardware to fully outfit it (except for a bit outdated parts taken from other machines). BUT - now that you mentioned it, I've got a GTX 1080 MXM bought for around 40 bucks a while back, it's been clearly reballed, it's brown with flux, have no idea if it works, but we'll see. If it works,

Today I've done some digging in my attic, found two busted to pieces Xbox 360 from times I used to mod those, hoping to find x-clamps - no luck, but they had pretty decent fans, four fans in total with a simple steering switch and a vacuum cleaner filter blowing inside should create a decent airflow to keep dust away.

Got around seven and a half months to wrap up all the projects, because after that, to quote Beetlejuice: The Musical, I will be 'trapped in a terrifying viper pit of diapers and regrets'

 

You probably won't have much luck with the 1080 as the die is usually in the wrong place and it's too power hungry for the MXM slot. Worth a shot for a $40 card though!

No regrets with a pit of diapers. You'll soon forget what a good nights sleep felt like.

 

Yeah, I know Can't wait My wife is even more extatic

For the colours, another idea was Vantablack (not likely) or Black 2.0/3.0 (more likely).
The 1080 I believe was sucessfully implemented in the Ranger, I've even seen the tutorial on the NBR forum, But I have only one Ranger for now ( considering another, since they run around 400-500$ here).

Furthermore, never using the crappy paper painting tape, ruined my liquid rubber for the control panel of M15x, it only sticks to things it's not supposed to... Three layers of rubber ruined...

 

Black 3.0 would be good to see!

 

Saw it around for sale for about 7$ for 15ml, so it's quite expensive, but hey, there is no stopping alienw-art (yes, I'm aware of the pun here )

 

Yeah that's pretty dear. You'd want to get it right.

With the white M18x I'm working on I was going to try to work in a faint M18x R2 silhouette on the LCD somehow. Something similar to what the new machines have but almost invisible. Maybe have the lid as gloss white but the M18x as a pearl white. I guess since I have to start it again I may give it a try.

 

Also thought about doing a pearlescent paint job. And another one, which may be quite difficult to pull off, would love to get a chrome mirror shine machine, with matte/semimatte accents on plastics, and all AlienFX set to red. A lovely tribute to Battlestar Galactica's Cylon Centurions

 

One more extreme idea was to make a case job with reflective paint, same powder stuff they use in road contstruction or protective clothing. another fling would be to make a fluorescent purple or fluorescent lime one. Some UV paint.

To be honest, I must say that Alienware kinda lost it's touch when it comes to design. It's as if Apple got it's grubby mittens on Alienware design, they look... Hm, candylike, safe, typical, well... Star Trek reboot like. The M15x/M17x were the most 'out there' design, most, 'different'; The very Ranger I love for the specs and possibilities is already tainted by this sleek future-like design, rather that truly alternative style, and after that to me it went downhill. And I know they are probably bound by the Recycling Act, where every gram counts, but going extremely light-weight and mostly plasticky IMHO made them lose spirit. M15x, the teenhood fantasy I've turned into my job machine, has this sort of an 'oomph' to it, the feel to it, I know it ain't a Threadripper/RTX 2080 SLI machine, but dammit there ain't no machine cooler than this one.

And the vagoogoo designs for new Aurora series desktops ain't helping their case either The old ones were a lot more, well, monolithic, aggresive, but not as cheesy as other gaming brands. They've had something to them.

 

I completely agree. The 2009-2012 machines were the pinnacle of laptop design, in my opinion. I would have preferred if they didn't use the Soft touch material on the M17x R3/R4 lid though. It ruins my ability to respray.

 

Exactly. Also the soft touch gets scratches simply from looking at it, either sand off everything or have a post-apo looking machine.

 

https://ibb.co/w6549yZ
https://ibb.co/TMXRVcc
The results on the M15XR2 so far. Still a lot of imperfections that I need to polish, a friend of mine said that my fascination with TARDIS blue is something you have to live with, but hey, I love it

 

Looks great!

 

https://ibb.co/71w2h2S
https://ibb.co/Sy3dW1w
https://ibb.co/7YwbPhH
https://ibb.co/KrXrkMC
Almost finished. Took out the vent grates and painted them as well. Can't decide whether to paint the top curved part of the control panel blue or paint the back curved part of the hinge with grey. Got both blue and grey hinge covers, but something is gnawing on my aesthetic sense

Also in a paint shopping spree got a few more colours, waiting for some inspiration

But I believe the next undertaking will be the M17XR2. Considering the case looks like a Lamborghini from the back, I'm thinking fluorescent green, I mean as green as the green can be. Like the Diablo from the '80/'90s. Will experiment with colour mixing effects in the meantime, next project doesn't need to be a single colour, could be some variation to it

 

Couldn’t open the link. Came up with a virus warning for some reason.
I’ve just started work on stripping the failed gloss white attempt on my M18x lid. I started sanding through the clear coats, base coats, primer and the original stealth black and got down to the bare aluminium (aluminum for you US guys). I’m now tempted to just polish it up
Only started on the edge for now



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There you go, converted to a smaller size to not trip external site's malware did the whole operation on mobile previously.

Looking forward to your endeavour, just might steal your idea

In case of the M15XR2 case I've also went for bare aluminium. It's a pain. In some places the paint comes too easy so you begin to scratch the metal bedrock, in other cases it simply won't budge. This one I did this way, next one I'll try to just even out all the bumps and go from there.

I recommend some use of vinyl spray. In my case all the grey parts are metallic grey vinyl, it looks great. Very easy to use and even to correct all the drops caused by excess use, simply finger it off, it levels itself. Con is that it sometimes comes off too easy, especially if the integrity is compromised due to a sharp edge or a scratch, but looks great.

 

Awesome job. I must have put down 50 layers off gloss white and the sanding was taking forever. Brought out the heat gun and a scraper and it was done in 5 minutes. I’m not sure if I’ll go for polished aluminium after all. It will be too hard to make it perfect and I’ve already finished the gloss white frame on this machine
Maybe I’ll try it on the M15x


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Started to try a mirror finish in one spot though, before I got the heat gun out.



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Can't wait to see your results also, I see you don't remove the alien logo. It's quite easy and makes it more efficient rather that securing it. Since you do hardware you must have izopropyl alcohol - just a few drops, wait a moment for it to react and it comes of with a little bit of prying with a small flathead. The glue itself seems to be something silicon based I believe, guessing by the fact under isopropyl it turns to jelly. Might even be reusable, but I will use something cyaonacrylic to out it back together.

 

No the head is off. There’s just paper taped behind the lid for overspray.


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I’ve primed it up now getting ready to do the gloss white again. I must have had some moisture or grease on the last attempt because one little area kept cracking during the clear coating.


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I've ran a test with two paints, one called silent violet, the other one being 'an unknown deep purple colour'. I was able to pry away two layers of M17XR2 bottom cover, gonna see how it covers and what are the layer effects on it. Silent purple is silverish with a slight violet shimmer underneath it, so maybe the vents will go silent purple ant the rest will be deep purple. Looks like CnC3 Scrin design when the green head goes in it will be perfect. For now it's just a test, but I will later do a full scrubbing and apply proper layering on it

 

Transplant completed. Need to hammer out a few kinks, and it seems I've forgotten to connect the lid Alienware logo, and the touchpad glows but doesn't react (probably need to cleans the flex strip, but it's done, and it looks gorgeous. Tomorrow during the day I will take some pictures and post here Your move, @Maxware79

 

Looking forward to seeing it. I’m going to leave the primer for a few days before I start putting the white down. Going to take my time this attempt. Rushed it last time and paid the price.


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Maybe this.......



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That would be... Interesting consider this - do this paint, let your kids scribble on it, then preserve with gloss topcoat kind of a memoir, ain't it?

 

There it is

 

A friend of mine who is a jeweller will look into chromium and nickel electroplating we'll see if it's possible to coat something with electrolysis

 

Looks good. I like how you’ve also done the grills. I started base coats on my M18x lid a few nights ago. Going to do a few light coats tonight. Taking this one nice and slow


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Front grills were done with gently prying the gloss part from the palmrest part, inserting tape to separate them and then spraying. With bottom cover, I have drilled them away and after all glued them back in. If you drill the pegs away juuuust slight enough for the grill to get out, it can be heated back in place with soldering iron.

Here is the base color scheme of my M17x, just the primer and base paint, no topcoats yet:

 

I did the bottom grills on my wife’s M17x. Used a dremel to slightly remove the plastic rivets and then they just needed a tiny drop of superglue to reattach.



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I'm going to look for for some hard coating, some ceramic paint or something, because my m15x already has a few scratches. Any suggestions for antiscratch coat?

 

I just use the Rustoleum Clear Coat.


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