this isn't the first time we've done a fatherson PC build online as Tech tips
it's not the first time we've done a multi-part video and it's not the first
time I have mounted a computer to a desk but I assure you that today's video is
very different from anything you've seen on this channel before this
collaborative project has been a long time coming with many helpers and the
result and I think you'll all agree was totally worth the effort welcome to
ultimate DIY desk
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description let's begin with the objective there are a lot of desk PC
builds out there and even prefa desk PC cases but they all share at least one
trait the price some are expensive due
to their use of Premium materials While others are expensive because they
require a well stocked workshop and a lot of time to build them this is
different what we're building is a from scratch design that we're calling the
ltd1 it's short for a desk one a
complete desk PC case that you can make your yourself with a single piece of MDF
a couple of saws and a piece of glass let's start at the beginning the first
plan was to buy a cheap table from Ikea or off Craigslist then build the rest of
the materials around that we rejected that because almost nothing we did would
be applicable to someone trying to replicate the project so we started
working from the other end what do all
sick looking desk PCS have in common a
big piece of glass so with some careful
measurements you can easily adapt our design to whatever glass top you can
find secondhand this is a big key for
this project because thick tempered glass that's designed to sit without
being fully supported the kind that you should use for safety is not cheap so
our glass measured 29.75 in X
5737 and cost us 40 bucks for the entire
table on craigslist we just discarded the legs and got to work now to keep
costs down the objective was to build the desk out of a single piece of MDF
plywood is another valid material Choice here it's stronger but we wanted a
smooth clean look something that might not matter to you so here are the plans
we used you can see here that the largest cut of wood is the bottom piece
that will be covered by the top glass just please note that if you want your
glass to sit flush with the wooden box around all the edges you'll need to add
three 3/4 of an in on every side to account for the thickness of the
material used to build the sides we attached them in this manner to hide
what would otherwise be unattractive seams around the outside of the desk for
the rest of the cuts you see here we have a cutof saw and a table saw so we
can work as we go but if you don't you can get your local building supply store
to cut them for you starting with the smallest pieces so the operator will
have more to hold on to officially it costs a dollar per cut but some places
will do more for free if you come in at a time when they're not busy another
sort of error that we made was in the height of the Box we made it exactly the
right height for Sid mounted 120 mm fans
then decided after the fact that we wanted a 3/4 in lip around the edge for
LED lighting effects but it ended up working out anyway because we changed
our mind about radiator mounting the next important measurement is one of the
coolest things about this design the knee cutout you can do pretty much
whatever you want here but the general idea is to avoid the awkward ARM
position that a thick table usually forces the user into we started using a
jigsaw with a ruler to guide it but and
this would have worked for plywood because we aren't using plywood it made
our blade Bend and it actually worked okay actually better to just draw a line
and Eyeball it my dad wanted Perfection though and since he already owns a table
saw he brought that over to fix it up so our knee cutout kind of got bigger and
bigger this was probably the hard hardest part of building the desk but if you have it pre-cut for you you
shouldn't run into that next up is the sides of the Box we originally tried to
nail these on but discovered that without pre-drilling it wasn't going to
work very well due to the crumbly nature of MDF the good news is that with wood
glue and clamps this stuff stays together astonishingly well spoiler
alert the entire end product is held together without a single screw or nail
next up is the legs one nice thing about building your own custom desk is that
you can have the height perfect for yourself we went with a 29 in height
from the top of the glass to the floor for our isoceles triangle reinforced
legs the assembly here is a little tricky you put the leg components
together like so then when the glue is grabbing a bit but not hard it'll be
about this color you can wipe off the excess then we position the legs at an
angle for a bit of extra strength they're supported at the top by those
trapezoid shapes an additional brace here between them down lower though
would be a good idea but it's not exactly weak without it next up is the
optional LED lip these are just thin strips of wood that we clamped in place
around the outside edge to allow us to light up the inside of the case without
being able to directly see the LEDs you
can actually get pretty perfect seams by wiping the glue at the right moment
during the drying process but as you can see ours isn't so in part two we may
have to address that somehow but how does all the hardware go
in well it actually took us a while to
figure that out big deal well you just
go like that that's awful isn't that what you
want everything about what you just did there is awful isn't that what you want
well I'm not sure yet so let's just kind of let's back up for a second here I
think have table holes I think the things should be centered and we might
just have to use extensions for the connectors that we need mhm where's the
power supply going I don't know well what's going to go over here though
that's that's sort of a concern right now is this just going to be like a like
a diarama of like gaming figurines like what are we going to put here what about
hard drives uh SATA cables that far not
sure if that's a very good idea well right there so what's going on with the
legs well you guys didn't have a preference so we decided to angle them
for beauty yeah so the desk itself will be beautiful but the computer might not
be in there you guys should have thought this
through first you know what Von finding you kind of UNS supportive
right now hey I helped your dad build this desk that's supportive that's true
that's supportive he did most of the work yes yes we know he did do that okay
all right so hold on let's just how this can we put that guy right there and then
the cables can have like a nice like thing that comes here
splits okay so we're thinking but again
we are now officially out of components to put over there mhm we still have hard
drives we still have reservoirs and but your reservoirs are really small no we
can't put hard drives over there Jake we can't run a SATA cable that's like 15 M
long so why don't we put where are we going to put the hard
drives then on hold on let's not get too
far away from our from from what's going on here so power supply can
go out and
up and up and up to where that needs to
go so that's fine then sorry we need to
get a mini one for gra oh yeah yeah but Cable model do completely custom link so
I'll just send them exactly what we need
then for this is stuff that I'm actually kind
of worried about like how to get here to here we have an extended we do yes don't
you put this here minus like go like
this um cuz you're still interfering no
you're still here no you're still going to hit it I
think hit it there instead of using hard drives we could just use SSD like this
are you sure hold on Jake we might be okay here okay hold my dad might have
solved the problem are we planning to do hard pipe
on this we can measure those in the bom
uh do you want to hard that doesn't uh I don't think we really need
to it might look kind of ghetto if we don't
okay so we could do these here we could go pump pump Y and then we could go res
res we still end up with some oh you
know what no so we go like res res and then we go how many
hard drives are there uh like four are they ssds no I don't I don't think we
have a choice on that one so basically we go up and we bring this pump up no we
can't no we can't we can't bring the
no we no no that's fine because we want no we want to hit the top of it so we go
up to the top of this pump then how are
we going to oh we have a right angle thing um but there are still there's
still the challenge of IO so power button I think is pretty I think it's
pretty straight forward we just need to find like a couple cool LEDs and power
buttons that we can put in the wood at the front right or we could just do we
could just do a hole and then just have a piece of have a piece of wood that
covers that just comes out to cover the cables that are plugged in yeah okay and
we just make it that simple so basically we would just glue a piece of cables in
but right here yeah it would be a little tough but
honestly it would be once it's
mounted okay so if that's the case then we'll do the exact same thing here mhm
and then and then we'll do the exact same thing here so actually would we
okay so how about this then would we just cover okay so we have a plan now and it
only took until after the desk was already basically finished being
constructed planning anyway so IO is
going to go here that's good cuz I'm right-handed and it's good because the
user is going to sit right about here is
kind of back a little bit you won't really see that so we're going to just bring our power button front USB blah
blah blah Etc couple LEDs right up there
then CPU and GPU are both going to have
two going between them and then over
across here we're going to we're going to try and do Hardline tubing wish me
freaking luck with this one anyway the point is uh you're going to get over to
these radiators they're going to go to their pumps and both of these pumps are
going to be able to draw air directly from a reservoir meaning that we're not
going to have issues with bleeding the loop um something that I have definitely
had to deal with in the past these fans are going to have White chromax Corners
so we're going to have like a black and white color scheme kind of thing going
on in here and in terms of power we're
going to use custom cable mod cables to go up over to here over to here over to
here similar to my last desk PC and then we're going to have um we're going to
use this lip under here see that it goes
all the way around the outside to run power to these drives and we're also
going to have cable mod SATA cables over to these drives from this direction and
then we're going to run power over to the pumps and fans over here hiding them
under the lip as best we can the other thing we're going to run around the
entire outside is RGB LED strips though
don't worry we're not just going to go one solid strip around the whole thing
and make it like a like a light show inside uh we're going to use extensions
to create gaps so we're just accent lighting the right pieces that was my
idea uh Jake was not responsible for that at
all and uh I mean yeah oh right right
right last thing so shroud um my dad says it's pretty simple to kind of go
over here and then down and then over so all we're going to do is put some holes
in the side so you can access your IO that makes this setup a little bit more
flexible for the future like oh I don't necessarily want to use DisplayPort
anymore like if we used extensions to get over there or something no no no
we're just going to have holes you can reach in you can do whatever it is you need to do now the Keen eyed among you
are probably asking yourselves ginus well you've got a bunch of exhaust
fanss where are you drawing air in to
which my reply is don't worry about it we have taking away the top we're not
going to put a piece of glass on it anymore new idea monitor balance is here
okay keyboard goes kind of right here kind of across here for stability while
gaming mouse get this you are going to
use the top of the water block of the video card making you the world's
biggest badass that's stupid isn't it yes okay
so no the piece of glass is still going over top but what we're going to do is
we're either going to use like these uh Silverstone filters or maybe we'll do
like a custom sort of larger mesh and we're going to do one intake right here
so because we're using High static pressure fans over on the other side
we're actually going to have a pretty decent amount of air flow sucked through
that filtered intake across the motherboard down towards the power
supply and over here and then out down
here over on the left and that is how we do it
when we plan everything after the fact oh yeah I didn't even explain the
disaster almost that was the radiators
so not having given my dad any guidance
in fact I said specifically I didn't care he did these cool angled feet under
the desk that almost made it impossible for us to mount these radiators over
here that's why they're kind of offset like this but it it ended up looking
like yeah we meant to do that so maybe we'll just leave this clip out and then
you'll never know that we didn't mean to do that cuz that's how video works
kids so the last thing here is we're doing a quick test fit of the glass you
can see the uh the4 in uh extra that we
have around now at this stage in the game you would have a couple of options
you could rebuild your table or you can
actually just get glass that is custom
made to to fit exactly um but we're
probably not going to worry about that for the purposes of this video video what I did want to say though is now
that we've got this on here we've realized you know you can even with
paint and even with sanding like you're going to see some of this so an optional
step at this stage would be to put some kind of a veneer over top of here so you
don't really see all these joins um might make it look a little sharper and
then to keep the glass from slipping uh and moving around you might also want to
consider putting like maybe like a roll on clear silicone around the edge so
that once you put it down it kind of sticks in place we'll let the silicone
dry first so it's just a grippy like a grippy texture around the outside so
you'd actually be able to lift it straight off you just won't be able to slide it so this this chair is a little
tall that's not how high the chair will be but check it out the knee Gap is
right there boom that's freaking awesome okay
so we're going to cover some of these
imperfections like right there so this is optional you don't really need to do
this because you could just painted that and once you put the the sort of
friction surface like silicone or some rubber surface you wouldn't see these
little marks anyway but we decided to go with a little bit of an ear so that's
optional so anyway the test fit with the glass looks awesome other than the
calculation error with the outside edge so the next step then is to see if we
can get around our half-ass planning and get all the components actually mounted
inside stay tuned for part
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purchase thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured I
mean MDF at Amazon in the video description maybe we'll put the hardware
that we're going to put in the system in there anyway also linked in the description is our merch store which has
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