Ahh... Another desk project log (and my first)! This project might be one of those which will never end, or at least takes year to finish, but I sure hope this will be ready in few months (or at least before summer). I've been planning for new desk for a while (two years?), and in the end I came up with three requirements, it must house all the PC-hardware neatly, must fit two monitors and have stands for them, and have good placement for speakers (reason why going down to two monitors side by side). I had bunch of terrible plans, but some of them had partly good ideas, which I basicly took together and used them with some ideas I've seen in the great modding-world, greating the perfection which would work for me. And here it is, the great SketchUp plan, with the final measurements! Yes, 24mm plywood (Birch plywood) As you might notice, there is two major parts, the desk itself and the cube with door, that houses the 19", sixteen unit rack (16U), and lil' bit space for other stuff too. The door is not "sealed" on the cube, there is about 13mm space between door and the frame of cube, so the air can flow in (I sure hope it's enough, if not I have plan for circulating more fresh air from another route). I started the build from the cube, as it should be harder than the desk itself and it's better start from the harder part so it's easier towards the end. So what I did, I got myself pile of pre-cutted 24mm birch plywood (I was initially going to use 30mm tight plywood but I found out that it was bit hard to get). So here we go! It sure made me smile little bit when I had the plywood, I was like "Dude you're finally going to do something, awesome!", that put a slight smile on my face and I went one higher with the gear and started working! I'm using wooden pins/studs and glue to attach the pieces together. So pretty much I just had to mark to the bottom and top sheet where the vertical walls will be, mark places for holes, and drill the holes on the top and bottom, after that I used alignment pins to mark right placement for the holes on the vertical "walls" so they will fit perfectly! Of course I had to have some music before started to work so iPod and some Going Quantum podcasts were with me. So first drilling the holes to the bottom and top parts and checking that everything looks good! Then it was time to get the alignment right with the pins. After I had the places for the holes marked with the marking/alignmend pins, I faced the problem that I found it bit hard to drill straight if the piece was horizontally, so I had to improvise little bit (notice the extra weight on the working table so it won't tip over!) Now it was much easier to drill straight and the working position was much better (there really was many holes to drill so you kind of want to get comfortable or you just will fail or/and have differend kind of pains later on) Just few holes As you might have noticed, I used stopper/limiter on the drill bit to get the depth of hole right, so the pin/stud won't just fall in and dissapear, making it useless. This is the current state of project for now! (Not glued up, put together only with few pins/studs) I have to get one more sheet of plywood cutted to right lenght (the one for the smaller compartment to divide it into half) then I can use wax/varnish to get bit darker tone to the whole cube, attach the rack-rails and start fitting the door in place. I'm currently thinking about different designs for the rack cases (as I will build them myself ofc ), the PC will be in 4U case and server on 2U, we'll see if I have some SketchUps to give you guys next week. I'm also getting pair of speakers (propably Genelec 8020), but I'm wondering what kind of stands I would want for them so they are off the desk surface, preferably somekind of adjustment on the height and direction wouldn't be bad. Every idea is wellcome! (Also I don't mind if you have tips for making DIY rack cases) This might seem more of a furniture than custom PC-case, but wait till we get on the rack-cases and other custom nonsense And is it alright with the max. 800px pictures? Rules say 640px but it seems that pretty many users are using 800px or even bigger pictures on their logs? If not, I'll resize them to 640px. Pweh... And sorry for typos, I tried to search for them and fixed a few already
This looks brilliant!! I can't wait for the next update, I'd much prefer those 800px images to 640px. I really need to get one of those limiters for my drill, usually I use a bit of masking tape to mark on the drill bit... you can tell how that goes horribly wrong. I'm thinking kind of futuristic here, but maybe make the whole draw thing spring loaded, and when you push it inwards slightly the draw will come out...I'm getting slightly carried away sorry :0
subscribed . about to start my own (much smaller) desk project so looking forward to following yours too.
Umm... I'm not sure did I get your point, but seems that you got way too much carried away. The "cabinet" will have just hinged door, and that's the only moving part, inside there will be the 19" rack (like a server rack, you know?). So I'm not sure what you were thinking... Yeah the limiter is kind of handy and very good, I was fisrt going to use just tape, zip-tie or something like that, but I ended up buying a very good drill-bit (for wood working) and the limiter as they were in the same package as the alignment pins. And yeah, thanks! I hope it will be brilliant when ready. It seems that desks are the thing nowadays (there seems to be quite few project logs already, and more coming up rapidly). Seems like people rather have the desk with all the hardware, and not the ugly plastic box next to Ikea desk. Ofc' nice and neat mods and scratch builds are always very attractive, don't get me wrong! And if you're transporting your PC alot, it's good to have it in a case (that's the reason why I'll use rack, so I can take PC rack-case out and put it in a tower-type enclosure to take it to the LAN-parties and such. Thou' the enclosure for the rack case will be whole other project later on ) Hehe, your desk was epic ^^ Thou' I'm not huge fan of windowed PC-cases/desks, but the water loop and radiator under your house was just epic! -- And for everyone who is reading, I would like to have good recommendations for good PSU that could fit into 2U case , basicly it can't have big fan on the side, it must have 80mm fan at front and back (or at both ends). Most of the regular PSUs are about 8,6cm high, which is just few millimeters lower than dimensions of 2U case, so in theory they should fit, I just need to find something I can trust as it will be powering my homeserver 24/7. Other possibility would be using genuine PSUs designed for 1U or 2U servers, but most of them seems to be way too low on the price (will not last long?) or way over priced (will last long propably). Thanks for the tips already!
nice project!!! i'm also have plans for my PC-desk... and for PSU - You can't go wrong with antec signature or TPQ series (yes, i know, they aren't cheap)
Okay, this day was full of fail, but sure there was some moments with win in it too. So let's start from where we left off last time, all pieces fitted together, now it's just matter of gluing the thing together (You might think that it's easy, but I can tell you with experience, it isn't IF you don't have the right tools). So as I didn't have enough F-clamps (and not even big enough with 800mm span) I had to figure out other way to pressure the pieces together, as some of you might know I'm pretty smart (no.. I'm really not) I had this great idea of using loading-straps So first I tested this idea: Cool! It seems to work like charm! So now I just placed everything ready..: ...and started to fit studs in the holes and put glue all over the place like a boss: So I started to fit the first wall-pieces to the floor-piece, gave it little bit rubber-hammer and tried to press it all the way down, but there was this small gap I was not able to get rid of! So I was using my prefect logic to solve the problem "GEEV IT SOM MOAR RUBBAAAHHH-HAMMMEEERRRH!" But no, this gap was very tough and didn't want to leave, so I decide to take it easy and figure out what was wrong with it, and found this from the other side where I couldn't see from where I was standing first: "No more studs freely bouncing on the floor-piece" I said to myself! And since I got rid of the very problematic stud which was behaving very much like teen-ager, the pieces fitted very well together (no gaps at all) and after slighty more punishment from mah rubber hammer it started to look pretty nice (I felt so much win at this moment that I was ready to drink tiger-blood with Charlie) and I was like "This is going to be a great success!" But since there was still few pieces to go I had to leave all the tiger-blood for later. Now it was pretty much just up to put the last wall-piece on and the top piece. So I went for it, MOAR GLUE! Ofc I had to sneeze at this very critical moment! Darn it! But despite the fact that the glue-trail isn't straight, I was making pretty good progress! So now I will introduce you to the tip of the week: Do not use (dirty) gloves that you have used while back in the military-service and serviced aircrafts/cars with! They leave pretty nasty "fingerprints" everywhere you touch (specially if it's something like birch plywood, very light, etc...). So use clean gloves or no gloves at all (if you prefer that) and you shouldn't have to do any unnecessary work. The good thing is that I'm going to sand the whole thing so it really dosen't matter for me Erhwww.. Soooo dirty, but anyway lets stay on the story! I was at the stage where I simply just had to throw the top-piece on and strap the whole thing down to pressure the pieces tightly together. Okay, what I do, I throw the top piece on, give it some RUBBAAAH HAMMEEAAARH! And look at the huge gap I have between one of the wall-pieces and top-piece despite all the rubb'ah-hammering I gave to it! Okay no problem no need to panic "I'll just strap the thing now and it will fix the problem and loose the gap!" Took the loading-straps and tightened 'em, and of course the cheaper looking, smaller and chinese tightening mechanism of the strap had to broke so I couldn't apply too much pressure to it anymore, but at least little bit (better than nothing, right). I had lose some of the gap, but it was still very noticeable and it actually left some light true too, so now I started to PANIC VERY MUCH! (ofc' I don't have pics from this fail-epic-panic-stage as I was like "Oh maann Ohmaaan! What am I going to do! FFFFUUUUUU"). Then I realized the only good thing about the situation, the glue I'm using doesn't dry very fast, so... ...I drove like a maniac to the local market, got two F-clamps with 800mm span, and one of these strap-thingies with corner pieces which is used to put stuff just like my cube together (why didn't I purchase these earlier!). So I drove back home (like a maniac again) and kicked the garage door down, made very Matrix-like leap for the cube, and put the F-Clamps and the strap-thing on (in bullet-time slow-mo) and got rid of the stupid gap I had! Success! Now I simply just called it a day (with much fail in it) and I took the final photo. BRILLIANT! (This is the stage where the project is currently!) So, now I'm waiting for the glue to dry and I can start thinking about how I'm going to finish the plywood and install the rack-rails and door. I'm still taking good suggestions for power supplies that can fit in 2U rack-case, so basicly: No huge 120mm fan on the "bottom", but max. 80mm fans on the front or/and back of the PSU. This will be for file-server use, so it must be pretty reliable too!
So I had a day off from university today, so I decided to install the 16U rack-rails on my cube-thingie. Not much else to say, sorry for the picture quality Installing the first Just wondering how cool it looks now! So at least that part is done now and I can actually install rack-equipment on it! Just gotta try to work with the rack-case designs so I can start building 'em someday... Seems like this project will be a long one Also need to buy second pair of rails to the back so I can get back support if necessary.
