garage. My mill is a Homier Mini-Mill (and currently halfway through a homebrew CNC conversion). I mounted the lid on the mill, outside down, using a clamping kit. The Mini-Mill was just big enough for the job — half an inch less travel on the Y-axis would have made the job extremely difficult.

I loaded a 1" end mill and cut out a rectangle around the Apple logo. Because end mills are round, the mill can’t cut inside right angles, so I then removed the lid from the clamps and filed the corners down (this only took about two strokes with the file). To make the inset, I took another iBook lid and hacksawed it down to a bit bigger than I needed; I then clamped it into the mill and milled it down to the exact size.

Next I filed off all the burrs and snapped the piece into the lid. A little super glue on the inside of the case held everything snugly in place, but still left a visible crack around the perimeter of the rectangle. I filled this with Bondo Glazing and Spot Putty, then sanded it down. Finally, I spray-painted the lid with Gloss White Krylon Fusion for Plastic. To prevent light from shining through where the logo used to be, I merely taped on a piece of aluminum foil.

Removing the logos from the operating system (Mac OS X 10. 3) was much easier, thanks to a share-ware app by Geekspiff called ThemePark (geekspiff. com/software/themepark) and CodeServant’s open source application ThemeChanger (codeservant. com/ themechanger.php). ThemePark presents a window with the graphical elements in the user interface and allows the user to just drag and drop replacement images over them. I replaced each Apple logo with Neil’s initials. Once I was finished with my changes, I saved the theme and installed it with ThemeChanger.

The boot panel — the window that appears during startup with the Apple logo and progress bar — can be modified just by replacing the PDF stored at /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/ QuartzDisplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf. This leaves a single Apple logo: the dark grey apple that first appears when you turn on your Mac. With Ryan Schmidt’s Startup Syringe ( ryandesign.com/ jagboot), replacing it is just drag and drop.

Tom Owad ( owad@applefritter.com) is a Macintosh
consultant in York, Pa., and editor of Applefritter
( applefritter.com). He is the author of Apple I Replica
Creation (Syngress, 2005).

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