Scratch Build – In Progress Project Industrial Wood

Hi!

So this isn't my first mod, but first that I'm doing a build log for. Also, this isn't a normal build log, what you might be used to here.
This log will contain:
- building whole setup (whole room, cable management, custom wooden desk, decoration)
- building custom open-air wooden "case" for my GF's PC
- building my own system, that will be custom watercooled and integrated into the custom desk

Everyone should find a little bit of inspiration here. It has been a couple of months in the making and now I'm getting into finishing it all. I'll quite busy this month so I don't know how much will I be able to get done, but I really want to have the setup done by the end of July.

First I want to get into the specs of both machines, so we can start off with a little bit of tech.

GF's PC (aircooled, open air, 1080p machine)
i5 7600K + Dark Rock Pro 3
MSI Z170 XPower Titanium
8GB Patriot Viper DDR4 @3200MHz CL16 (i think)
GTX 1060 3GB (I may swap it out for something more powerful, not sure yet) + Prolimatech MK-26 (with 2 Enermax 120mm White Cluster fans)
2x 240GB SATA SSDs (I might add some NVMe, not sure yet)
Seasonic Focus Plus Gold 550W + some white cable extensions

My PC (watercooled, built into a desk)
i5 7600K
ASUS Maximus IX Extreme
16GB HyperX Savage (will OC after finishing the build)
AMD Vega 64 (I want to power-mod or flash LC BIOS onto the card and push it to 1080 Ti territory)
Samsung 860 Evo 512GB + 1TB WD Black (may add NVMe, not sure yet)
Enermax Platimax 1350W + custom MODDIY cables

The watercooling HW:
CPU: Bitspower Monoblock
GPU: AquaCool Stixion B-440 (custom Czech CPU water block, quite good actually, modded to fit on Vega, I have one XSPC Raystorm GPU around but modding that to fit on Vega would be more hassle)
Reservoir: Cawedog Cyklon-1 (also custom Czech res., whirlpool design, with one integrated 10mm led diode, looks super cool with good flow
Pumps: 2x Laing DDC-1T Plus (Both modded to 3-Pin only so I can power them from MB, this MB has two 3A designated Pump 4 pin headers )
Radiators: Alphacool XT45 360 (+ 6x AeroCool Shark White - Push/Pull), Modded radiator from a Fridge I believe (fully passive, copper cubing + aluminum fins, big and thick, loads of cooling performance, had him for some time)
Lots of mix and match fittings, adapters (45° as well as 90° ones)
Also, note that this is a SOFT TUBING build. I could have done partly hardline, but I wanted to reuse fittings from my last desk build. I haven't done rigid tubing yet and I don't want to get into it yet, maybe in my next build. But I want to make it like hardline, partly, mostly straight and clean runs, lots of adapters, you'll see.


So those are the PC specs I'll be working with. So now let's get into the whole room and PC layout.

So this is how the room looked like before.


I've changed out the carpet (still in the fitting process, I'm letting it just lie for a couple of days before final sutting) and I repainted the walls. (You can also see a basis for a new chandelier (all custom made by myself - acacia wood)


The layout of the room should look something like this:


So for the L-shaped table, I bought acacia wooden worktops. they were 240cm x 60cm x 2,7cm.
I bought 3 of them and used almost every inch of them. (Ignore the Czech writing, I'm Czech and I mostly plan things out in Czech, not in English). But the important bit is that I wanted 80cm of depth from my table, so I had to extend the worktops I bought.


Good thing I have a workshop out in the countryside.
So I cut the desks up, sanded them, matched them, and glued them together.


Also since I wanted the L-shaped desk, I made a smooth connection out of one extra glued piece. A bunch of woodworking later I ended up with this:
¨

(I curved the edges so resting my hand on them would be more pleasant.)

Also as you can see the wood was stained in the shop I bought it from, so if I do anything to it, the stain is stripped and acacia is not the hardest wood in the world so more work was ahead.
I bought a brown wood stain and a clear hard (dancefloor) wood paint and got to work.
Some sanding, staining, painting, sanding, and painting again I ended up with this:


This is as much for the setup as I can show you guys today, but I have done a bit more work and more stuff is ready, the table is finished in terms of woodworking. Now fitting it together and actually mounting it in the room is left, which is still quite a bit of work. So that is to come.

The open-air case for my GF is done as well (as I'm finished with woodworking and the case is all wooden), but sadly I haven't had the time to take any photos yet, so that is coming in another update.

Now we are getting to my PC. Firstly the layout (as I don't do 3D-Modelling and sketch everything oldschool on paper it might look clear):


Now the cuts that I will have to do in the wood bottom (it has been since modified a bit):



And the finished product:



As you can see, the acacia bottom desk is in custom wood "legs", that I've made for my previous PC desk build. But that time I used MDF board as the bottom part, now I'm using real wood. The legs are real wood (not sure which wood I've used, probably oak). I still have some work to do on them as I need to sand them clean and paint them to match the look of the acacia. But that will come in another update.

Sadly that is all I have for you today. But more is coming! Let me know if you have any questions and feel free to comment. I hope you like the project so far!
Cheers.

 

Lovely stuff. The brackets don't deserve to be in such a nice setup.
I want a barn workshop.

 

Hi,
Welcome here and good luck for your project. You're wirkshop looks big, very big !!!

 

Oh dear god! im in love with your barn too!!!! that trailer OMG! and i seen HAY!

But really im loving the wood work specially that curved edge!

Like Cheaps says ... dem brackets gotta go!

 

I tried painting them to copper metallic color. We'll see how that turns out. That would match the look of other components going inside as there will be quite a lot of copper-colored components in the finished build.

If that doesn't do and it won't blend in, I'll just screw it to the legs from the bottom.

On that note, I had a thick-layered lazure mixed in a local paint shop and did the first layer on the legs. As they are from a prior build, the color is way off. But after a second coat (that I'll be doing today) it should match the table well (fingers crossed).

Oh and today, I might show you the base that I made for the open-air pc. Expect an afternoon/evening update.

EDIT: Also, I wanted to add that this build is completely NON-RGB. There won't be any RGB components (apart from the motherboard, but that will be set to white permanently). All lighting will be cold white for the components and the rest will be warm white (2700K warm white led strips around the edges of the table and 2200K warm white+ LED filament light bulbs). So the whole room should be really cozy and I can't wait for the finished product.

 

Wow, that looks like a lot of work but i like your concept

 

Yes, à no Rgb build !!!
Following your thread !

 

Alright. So it has been more than a week since my last update, life tends to get in the way.

But, fear not, I've been working on this build as well.

So things I've done in the past week:
1. glued some glass and mirrors for the internal structure of the desk PC
2. test fitted the 2nd PC
3. Painted the legs of the desk PC
4. painted bunch of stuff to copper color (but I'll show you only the painted fittings and L-brackets today)
5. test fitted components into the desk PC (sanity check)

So... point 1, glass and mirrors:


Here you can see the "motherboard tray" and a cable tunnel. Since I'll not be moving the table I've decided that I don't have to hold the motherboard with screws and I'll just rely on rubber pads. It's not perfect, but it'll do the job just fine.
There was a fair bit of more glass work, but I didn't take photos of that.
For the glue, I've used Pattex one for all Crystal (that should be fully transparent.

What you see here isn't the final form of this as I might "wrap" the edges of the glass in wood. Not sure yet.

Then I painted the legs (which you might remember were quite pale compared to the rest of the table):

I think that they now match nicely. 2 coats were just enough (maybe they are a bit darker but it was as close as I could get as the painting process is completely different from the rest of the wood used and it's a completely different wood altogether).

Then I went into painting the adapters (45° and 90°), sanded them, did 1 coat of base layer, sanding, 2 coats of copper color and finished with one clear coat.


In the meantime, I've started with the sanity check test fit of the desk PC:





I didn't even try any cable management yet.
For those who might as why I didn't mount the MB directly to the wood:
there are two reasons:
1. I need some space to hide my disks
2. I need some space to run cables and hide any excess cables

Also, you can see where my intake is (I will be covered by a mirror later on so the fans will not be visible) and where my outtake XT45 360 rad is. This way there will be decent airflow over the components (which is a big improvement over ma old desk setup - not enough airflow in the case).

Then I added a bunch of stuff:



Bear in mind that a lot of the things here aren't in their complete form and some of the components will go up in height (mainly one of the pumps, the res as well as the power supply.
And cable management is non-existent (wires from pumps and res will all be united in one sleeve for example) and I have a lot of work ahead but this might give you a glimpse of what will this look like, including the tubing runs.

The open-air PC had a test fit of the components as well:



The last picture shows how it will be fitted to the desk - standing up. Also, I've decided not to mount the GPU vertically. It just looked weird and this looks much better.

Well, thanks for reading my updates and be prepared for more updates. Next week will be quite stressful for me and I won't have much time left for this build. But the week after that... I'll finally have some free time and I'm planning to fit the table into the room. But we'll see how that goes, so stay tuned.

If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them, keep up the comments, they are very much appreciated! <3
Cheers.

 

I

I love the woody hardware tray !
Your mod just could stop here

 

The more I'm looking into it, the more I want to add some wooden accents to the glass. I'll have a little bit more time now so more is coming.

I want to add a sliver of wood (like 1cm thick max) on the bare glass holding the motherboard, next to the motherboard, do the same to the glass channel for the cables (slivers of wood on both the glued sides) and a small wooden triangle on the inside of the mirror cable shroud, where the mirror ends (on the side of my Vega 64).

Then I need to make wooden stands for the res and one of the pumps and some small pieces here and there. Also, some wooden stands for the glass "motherboard tray", to properly support it.

More work, but I'm happy to do that. This should be an instant eye-catcher in the room. I got the hardware, time to make it shine.

EDIT:
Oh and one more thing. Some people have done it and I want to do it for myself as well.
I have a couple of defective parts that I want to use for wall decoration. Make a one big picture out of it.

I have like 5 high-end motherboards (old s775 DFI, MSI Big Bang Marshall, Sandy bridge Maximus Gene, Gigabyte G1 Sniper2 and ASrock Fatal1ty), a Radeon HD4870 X2 and a GTX480. I want to paint the PCBs white (cause they will be mounted on a white wall) and the heatsinks copper.

I've already started with the paint job on the Maximus Gene and it looks awesome. So I'll definitely be doing the rest as well.

My problem is: How to mount all these to the wall?
Does anyone have an Idea? (I don't want to permanently damage the wall and I really don't wanna go the way of welding a proper mount plate for them)

 

Well, we have a modder here with a similar apartment situation that built a light framing and paneled over the entire room.