Fixed up my Toughbook

I've fixed up my Toughbook. OK. It's not really brand new. In fact it's considered to be a bit long in the tooth: Centrino 1.3Ghz, 1.2GB RAM, 160GB hard disk drive and a bit banged up in the beginning. If you're one of my pals who've seen in before I did this paint job thing, you'd know there was a huge dent and flaked off paint, right above the centre hinge part of the magnesium alloy cover...

So I've plugged the hole up with some metallic-epoxy resin putty, sanded the CF-29 (that's the Toughbook model) and painted it errrr several times. I've done some customising jobs before on some older laptops and PCs sometime ago but those weren't very good jobs....

First I took the 'repainting the original' path and attempted to spray the beast silver after (sufficient masking to prevent paint going onto the screen, keyboard and other parts). Take my advice, the silver spray paint in the can makes your custom job look cheap - it made the anondized magnesium alloy cover look like plastic painted silver...

So what did I try next? Green & black - the 'x' crevice motif on the cover filled with black. Then I realised that: great now it looks too much like Ben 10! This was confirmed by a 6 year old too.

So Army Green from Samurai paints was the last colour I tried and my wife thinks the colour suits the Toughbook - or it could be that the family can't bear breathing in the fumes for so many days.

If you count all the layers of paint, after re-sanding the rough parts and respraying - I think I've got over 10 layers of paint on this thing.

Well. It's a project. Sometimes fixing up stuff and doing this sorta thing is somewhat therapeutic for yours truly...

My guess by now would be you asking & saying: Why in hell would you want to get a Toughbook? The one you've got is old and a Netbook would have sufficed! - That will be answered in the next post.