I am not so sure that wood is as flammable as you think. Hard wood needs sustained heat for a reasonably long period of time to get going.
And anyway for a computer system there is no reason why you can't do some fireproofing - get some borates, silicates or other salts to keep the organic matter away from the oxygen. Waterglass (Sodium silicate) is cheap and readily available. Although I guess the main negative factor for us is the presence of a high airflow bringing lots of fresh oxygen. So if you could use oxygen-free cooling air (!) or otherwise shut the airfow off triggered by a smoke detector ... Daniel From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter St. John Sent: 23 October 2008 18:33 To: Robert G. Brown Cc: beowulf@beowulf.org Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Cases for DIY boxen Robert, Yes, the consensus (offline) had seemed to be that humidy, thermal insulation, etc are not issues; and the only issue would be flammability. And yeah, I actually watched a capacitor explode under ideal circumstances (it was shadowed dark behind the box where I was looking, wondering why the prototype game box was behaving badly); it shot a beautiful little jet of flame. Incidentally, Sebastian Hyde has pictures of a really beautiful black walnut PC. I think the right word is "baroque". Really beautiful. But yeah consideration would have to made for the fire issue. Peter On 10/23/08, Robert G. Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Peter St. John wrote: On the subject of Doug's "A Case for Cases" http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7164, I had noticed that the Helmer thing ("bewwulf in an Ikea cabinet") is not really in a wood cabinet (the steel box can be put inside a cabinet). I'm assuming it's unreasonable to actually make a wood cabinet? On account of humidy, or just weight? To me it just sounds easy to build a wooden rack for a bunch of ATX motherboards. And it could look nice. Thermal and electrical insulation would be OK, and humidy controlled with a good paint job on the interior...? What about fire? Anything electrical can in a worst case pop hot/molten metal before frying and/or blowing a breaker. Capacitors blow up (literally). A wire is badly soldered and pulls free and grounds out, spattering white hot metal. Inside a metal shell, odds are you won't get a REAL fire as there isn't much actively flammable around. In a wooden box, carefully dried by six months of 50C heat... it wouldn't take a lot to get real flames, especially if the box had e.g. a cooling fan mounted to actively fan a hot coal into flames. rgb Peter -- Robert G. Brown Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443 Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb<http://www.phy.duke.edu/%7Ergb> Book of Lilith Website: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php<http://www.phy.duke.edu/%7Ergb/Lilith/Lilith.php> Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977
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