are you tired of reaching down to plug in a usb stick do you hate that mess of
cables under your desk are you sick of hard to use phone
charging cables meet the LTT clean desk v2 it's our meanest cleanest desk setup
yet and it was completely scratch built for the ultimate in cable management
perfection thank you lg for sponsoring this video and now why don't we all take
a closer look at what you guys paid us to build
lg's ultrafine ergo display features a 32-inch 4k ips panel which is great for
watching videos getting work done or whatever you want but it also isn't its
most interesting feature the ergo in the name is because the included adjustable
monitor ARM forgoes the traditional large base and instead uses a much more
compact desk clamp the ARM gives you the ability to move the display 180
millimeters or seven inches away from the stand and swivel it 280 degrees in
addition to your typical tilt rotate and height adjust that made it the perfect
candidate for a project that one ups our last cleanest desk setup
in its push-back position the monitor has a distinct asymmetrical look to it
and the goal was to complement that look rather than build just another basic
rectangle desk we ended up choosing the single bump design to keep the
integrated usb hub out of the way of the chair to give artistic users a larger
work area and for aesthetics
for our material we chose baltic birch plywood for its light color strength and
great layering pattern did i mention this is a scratch build by the way
nicholas is going to put all the plans in the description if you all want to follow along
for dimensions we settled on the five foot width of our sheet to save a cut
and for depth we felt 28 inches allowed both comfortable computing thanks to the
ultrafine ergo and with a quick transformation ample space for hobbies
like drawing model building and the like now the main innovation of our table is
its invisible cable management high performance wireless keyboards and
mice have been staples of clean setups for years
but the problem is that we don't have the technology yet for wireless high
speed usb or high resolution display
connections at least not with low latency so we came
up with the idea of routing channels on the underside of the table to tuck our
cables into and then we chose legs that are both aesthetically pleasing and
hollow the idea here is that our desktop
and the floor underneath can be totally free of rat's nest cable mass
we laid out the potential cuts then set up the desk like it was intended to be
used this actually ended up helping us choose the hump as the home for our usb
3 hub i mean no one likes bumping a usb stick and breaking it off we've all been
there as for our wireless charging chi spot
the left side keeps it out of the way and maximizes usable space on the right
lefties may actually prefer to mirror the entire design
marking the final cut lines cable channels and where our legs will attach
was next a quick tip by the way mark an x on any areas to be cut this will make
it easier to remember which side of the line you want to stay on and provides a
quick reference to what should be cut off we then used a jigsaw to remove most but
not all of the material this was to make sure that when we went back and cut with
our handheld router the cutting kind of router not the
networking kind of router we would be able to get a clean smooth surface using
long rulers and some of our filament spools as guides for our flush trim
router bit we were able to clean up all of the edges of our table to its final
shape for those of you wondering what a flush trim bit is it's a router bit that has a
bearing at the bottom or the top that matches the diameter of the cutting part
the bearing rides along a template or guide that you want to cut and the bit
then cuts that shape next we drilled out the holes for the
legs and instead of using a normal wood screw we went with these threaded wood
inserts they allow us to easily install and remove the legs without having to
worry about the screw holes wearing out and becoming unusable over time
make sure you choose a good quality insert though we had a couple that didn't want to install all the way in
before breaking and when they break well
they are a royal pain in the tush to remove for cutting the cable channels a
combination of freehand routing and using a straight edge as a guide was
used to make multiple passes down to the quarter inch depth that we needed then
for the wireless charging pad the hole was cut freehand to just inside the
marked circle with multiple very careful passes to get down to just
one and a half millimeters of material left that's about the thickness of a
grain of rice we then slowly clearance cut until the
charge pad fit perfectly to hold it in place we used some scrap
metal flat bar cleaned it up and gave it a slight bend in the middle so that once
screwed down the bend in the flat bar would push against the pad holding it in
place to make the desk look thick that's with two c's of course but still have it be
light enough to move around we added a one inch skirt to the entire outside of
the desk now to make the skirt you could take the time to make an exact copy of
the tabletop that's one inch thick or you could go the faster route of
using the scraps and off cuts from making the table in the first place we
cut down the scraps to an inch and a bit the exact size doesn't really matter you
just want to make sure there's enough material to give you a strong glue bond you don't have to worry about overhang
at this stage by the way because that's going to be taken care of with the flush
trim bit do make sure however that there is no undercut because it'll look like there's
a chunk of wood missing from your desk the skirt was then glued down then
routed to match the skirt to the tabletop looks tiring
good thing we have these huge 40-ounce water bottles
ltteststore.com now we chose a five and a quarter inch
bay usb hub that has five type a ports and a gen 2 usb type c port power for
the hub is handled via a SATA connector and data is handled by this 16 foot
optical usb 3.2 gen 2 cable
oh and then also this male-to-male coupler because the pictures on amazon
for the hub weren't great to fit the hub and not have to cut a
giant hole into the side of the desk we had to strip the hub down to its pcb and
grab a drill bit that's about as tall as the components on the hub
we used a drill to remove the majority of the wood then a hammer and chisel to
open it up the rest of the way with frequent test fits and clearance checks
until the hub fit correctly then the face plate that came with the
hub was trimmed down and an inlay was cut so that it would be flush mounted
some more cuts were made so the cables could clear the legs and fit into the
channels next up was making the pass-through holes in the leg for our
cables one in the top drilled out with a step down bit and then filed until it
was big and smooth enough to pass our cables through then for the bottom same
procedure just a lot wider to make grabbing the cables
easier to smooth the table for final assembly we started with 120 grit sandpaper to
knock down all the sharp edges on the table and round the corners a bit and
then next was 220 grit then after a wipe
down with a damp cloth the table was sprayed with its first few coats of
satin clear varnish these coats need to dry for about 24
hours after which you'll notice the wood grain becomes more pronounced or it
tends to pop out a little bit more this is called grain rise and it happens when
the wood swells a bit from the varnish all you need to do to fix it is lightly
sand the top with 320 or 400 grit till it's smooth again and after that give it
another wipe down with a damp cloth to get rid of all the leftover dust spray
another couple coats of varnish let it dry overnight and come back to admire
your wood in the morning now that the table is done all that
remains is to well see if it functions as advertised
this is actually my first time being close up with it first order of business
i guess is to take advantage of ah
the main benefit of the approach we took here
so this is sick the only area where there's any cables
visible on the desk okay there's a small wrap around at the back where the
monitor ARM comes down then it goes into our built-in cable channel
then there's an umbilical cord that comes out here along with the there you go power
brick for the monitor and that's it those are hidden off next
to your you know super sexy clean looking pc and the entire bottom of the
desk is unobstructed so mission accomplished as far as that
goes obviously using a hub instead of
dedicated runs for each of these usb ports means that you are limited to the
maximum speed of the single tether connection that goes back to the main
computer but given that this is just for like you
know front peripherals or whatever realistically i don't think you're going
to want to plug in too many high high-speed devices at the same time so this
is a type-c steam library drive i'm just
going to pop in there and see if it works i guess
what a wonderful question yes i can turn the brightness down sorry we need to
turn it down for the camera but uh for your eyes you might want it pretty
bright it does 350 nits peak brightness and it is hdr10 compatible so if you
have an HDR signal coming into it that will work
is that better brandon theoretically this should be fast enough for me to use
as a game library here so let's go ahead and
add another library in steam monitor's got speakers uh one moment
please just turn those off
they're allowed there we go so we're running off there just fine if we had a
lot of high-speed stuff plugged in it could be a problem but if it's just like
you know a usb key and then something like this for your steam library i don't
expect it to be an issue am i in a real match right now that's fine i can win
this this isn't the fastest panel that i've seen lg advertises a five millisecond
greater ray response time so it's not exactly like the ultimate gaming monitor
but the colors look great ah oh come on
why is this game so hard this is cool though check this out
if i'm like oh yeah time to go more immersive
look at that we actually did a video recently where we took a gigantic tv
also from lg and then surveyed our staff to see what viewing distance they felt
was optimal and what we discovered was that depending on the type of content
people actually felt pretty differently about viewing distance got all of them
adjustments oh yeah so if i'm like you know what
this is how i want a game right now oh
it's not going to make me good at it but it's definitely sweet i could blame it
on the keyboard and mouse but we all know that's not what's happening here we
can just you know figure out more of the ways that i can appreciate how hard i'm
getting owned right now so if you want to have more of like a top-down viewing
experience that's totally cool too it's like whatever is ergonomic for you
there's actually a ton of range of movement here alternately if you're
doing something else entirely you can just like have a movie on like over
there it's kind of out of the way i like this this is sweet what do you think
brandon traditional monitor arms
lame yeah pretty much
this looks so much better it takes up no space on my desk so i can be like you
know what screw this game because i'm terrible at
it put all this stuff away
and i'm gonna get up to something else entirely here yeah thanks for nothing
rocket league like obviously monitor arms existed
already but this is just a less wasteful approach why bother buying a junkie ARM
that you're not going to use that's going to have to sit on your desk and just go in a closet somewhere when you
could just have it come with the right thing
great love it sorry team hey i blew up one of
the bad guys though well maybe we're the bad guys
we're definitely bad man i remember when 30 inch monitors were like
crazy crazy expensive and you know no one had them because it was like ah
that's totally unnecessary now it's like yeah 30 inch this is a good size 30 inch
4k is not only big it's also sharp enough that no
matter what distance you are from it it doesn't have any kind of noticeable
pixelation or screen door effect let's fire up like from your project oh
yeah and of course you're at the native resolution if you want to work with like
high-res video content the ergo also offers 95 coverage of the dci p3 color
space so it's perfect for something like photo editing or video editing as long
as you're not expecting to master HDR content and of course we could just
watch movies oh i'm going to switch it into HDR mode actually
oh wow well the hdrness is definitely kicking
in here we just really did not do a great job of mastering this video the
term for that according to the kids is big yikes big boo flyness but the
monitor is working as we expected in conclusion i think we achieved what
we set out to do which is absolutely no visible cables from a user
perspective and nothing to interfere with your feet when you're sitting at your desk but i do think there are
things that we could do to even take this to another level maybe
drilling out the bottom of the ergo stand so the cables can go right down
into our table with the integrated you know cable management channel or maybe
uh integrating one of logitech's power play mouse pads like into the desk or
something so that you never have to charge your mouse
but that's a project for another day for now if you guys enjoyed this video uh
check out the link down below to all of the materials that we use to create it
and if you want to watch something else like this get subscribed because we're
going to have the ultimate desk pc version 2 coming as well where the
actual pc is integrated into the desk and it's not much thicker than this