So like many of you, I have several old junk computers that are inop for one reason or another. I'm salvaging still working parts from them before I take them out to my rifle range and fill them full of holes and sell them for scrap.

I had the idea of taking an old ATX power supply, wiring in an on/off switch to replace the computer's power button, and removing all of the wires except one ground and one 12V positive wire. This gives me an extra 14 amp power supply to test CB/HAM radios that I'm working on, as well as other devices you would normally use in your car. Tonight I verified it is functional. Tomorrow I'm going to dig out the dremel and remove the case, and cut out spots for the switch and some red/black studs so that all of the wires will remain inside the case, and I'll have two color coded studs to attach electrical wires to instead of splicing/twisting each new device and fatiguing the wires built into the power supply.

I tested 3 different power supplies, and although all of them "said" 12V DC on the stickers, they all came in a little on the low side, but it's within safe operating range so what the heck. The longest part of the process was unsoldering all of the extra wires I didn't need from the PCB and removing them. Between making sure I was soldering the correct spot on the back side of the board and waiting for my soldering iron to melt those huge globs of solder at points where 3 and 4 wires ran together, it took about 30 minutes just to do that. I thought about cutting them off and leaving them inside, but then I figured that eventually through movement one of the hot wires inside would end up touching the outside shell of the power supply or something else important and frying the whole thing, so I removed them completely from the PCB and left only the ones I needed.

Anyway, this is the first time I've done this, and thought I'd share. The CB radio in the picture is just an extra I had laying around to test it with, and is running on the power supply in this picture.

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