How to Steampunk a Firewire HDD

Step 2 Leather

Cut a strip of leather of appropriate size for the "book cover" . I did this project mainly because I already had a bit of old leather I had removed from an old chair I reupholstered recently... Of course which part of the old leather you choose has a great impact on the look of the book, so I chose a very used piece from the front of the chair, where the leather had been squashed, torn, whetted blank, besmudged etc...

The LED on the Western Digital HDDs is not really well suited for steampunking - maybe if you got a white or red LED edition, you might be more lucky... but fact of the matter is, it really is convenient if you`re backing up 3 servers simultaneously to just have to watch the flashy LEDs to see if the backup is already complete while you`re already juggling 5 ssh-connected other machines upgrading them to lenny on the fly whilst spawning new technological solutions to problems most people outside the hacker community will never have..... I guess you see where I`m going with this.
I did not like it, but I had to integrate the LED/Button on the front into the design... If you are merely annoyed by it, feel free to completely cover it up and ignore the rest of this step.

To mark the center I simply folded the leather in half both ways and marked the crest with a pencil. Then, I found myself a fitting template for the button, drew a circle around it after placing it roughly in the middle and cut out the circle with ordinary scissors...(btw:not really the way to go! If you got a good work surface and a sharp knife I would recommend you use those, instead)