Well, I de-rived and disassembled the case as much as possible a couple days ago. I was forced to stop when I ran into these spot welds.
I wasn't sure how to remove them so I did some research (and got help from OCN'ers
) but I couldn't find a 1/8" spot-weld drill bit anywhere locally so I decided to grind the welds out with a grinding stone.
Took a while but I buzzed out all the welds on the piece!
I put a couple tiny scores in the roof panel taking out one of the welds. Nothing deeper than about ~1/32" and they are on the inside of the panel plus they will be covered with paint. All the other welds came out fine with very minor abrasion damage to the roof panel from the grinding stone.
That's all the grinding I got to today (it's loud and the neighbors were out barbecuing - I didn't want to be an ass)... I've got about 10 more to do tomorrow.
I also cut the 5 1/4" optical drive enclosure things so that 320 rads will fit in the front of each compartment.
I located a guy sort of near me who does custom powder-coating. He said since black is a common color I could leave the pieces with him for a couple days and he will run them with a bigger job so it will only cost me around $45 which isn't that much more then spray paint and primer would cost, plus it will be a way better job that I could do myself.
A friend of mine suggested scrapping the case's original center divider (part the mobo is mounted to) and replacing it with a sheet of 1/4" smoked acrylic.
EDIT: By the way, Performance PC stocks the exact black 1/4" rivets that I need!! I was going to order a new water block from them in the next couple days so Ill grab a hundred or so rivets with that order...