My Snow iMac Adventure

I acquired a Snow iMac several years ago when someone found it at a store and picked it up for me. I already had a bunch of iMacs but not one in Apple’s Snow color. I find Snow to be rather boring, but it’s still an official color and it belongs in my collection. Mine is a Summer 2000 DV SE model representing the top offering at the time. It includes a 500 MHz G3, 128 MB RAM, a 30 GB hard drive, and a DVD drive. It has Mac OS 9 installed, but does have enough memory to run Mac OS X.

It was fine as an addition to my museum, but it had one problem: there was a chunk of the case missing from the back. I put some clear tape over it and forgot about it for years until I was moving it around recently and realized that the missing piece of case was inside the machine. If I could just turn it the right way, the piece would fall out and I could glue it into place. That didn’t happen and I had to take it apart.

It wasn’t hard, but it was a bit tedious. The iMac has a lot of screws and many of the case panels are tucked into one another with clips and tabs. In order to get enough clearance to take out the missing piece I had to take the bottom, front bezel, and outer shell off. In the process I noticed that the inner front bezel was cracked, which later turned into completely broken. I found the missing piece, but I couldn’t put the iMac back together until the front bezel was fixed.

I ended up Gorilla Gluing it in two places so that it would be strong enough to reassemble. It didn’t go back together perfectly, causing the left side of the CRT to have a bit of a gap to it. Otherwise it functions just fine. The whole process was more than I bargained for but I did retrieve and restore the missing piece and also learned a lot about how the iMac was constructed. I’ve included a video of my experience below.