Hey welcome back Today I'm gonna show you how I built this
homeoffice / gaming desk which comes with a ton of useful built-in features to improve
usability and keep things clean and tidy As usual I'm gonna explain the idea behind
this design a little bit first and then we'll get to building. The thing that drove me to design a custom
desk was mostly that my old desk setup was much too small to store all my stuff and always
looked pretty messy due to the non existant cable management. Of course I could have just bought a bigger
desk but instead I decided to try and design a much more specalized piece of furniture
that solves a lot of my desk related problems all at once and here's the result The main difference commpared to a normal
desk is that it has this integrated shelf on top which solves my storage problem and
provides a place to put my 3d printer. The desk also has its own back wall and that
allows you to install both the monitor and speakers directly to it so they can just float
over the desktop which frees up the entire workspace, and the back wall also helps with
managing and hiding all the cables. Then there's also an integrated shelf undearneath
where the PC can live and my favorite feature is this huge cable tray underneath the tabletop
which can be used to store all of your powerstrips, cables, power bricks and whatever else you
might want to hide, and the best thing is that you don't have to crawl underneath the
desk to get to it, because it can be accessed from the top by opening this lid in the back,
which also doubles as a space to install USB hubs and power outlets. The table is based around a steel frame, mostly
just because I like welding a lot more than I do woodworking, but also because as someone
who moves apartments way too often, another important design aspect was to allow this
thing to be taken apart for transport. and for that reason the frame consists of
several individual pieces that are held together by a few screws, so it can be completely disassembled
into managable pieces when it needs to move to another place. Here's the main materials for the frame, it's
mostly steel square tubing and some flat bar so pretty basic stuff and actually not too
expensive. Since I completely planned this build in CAD
beforehand, I knew exactly which workpieces I would need so the first step was to cut
and drill all of the individual steel pieces for the frame. When fabricating this kind of thing, it's
always a good idea to drill all the holes before welding when the individual parts are
easy to handle, especially if you have a drill press. you're gonna get more accurate holes than
with a handheld drill but it can also save you a bunch of work. For example with the symmetrical pieces this
allows you to drill two of them at once which makes it twice as fast and also makes sure
the holes are lined up. I'm also doing some weld prep here, I know
a lot of people skip this and sometimes I do it too, but it actually helps the quality
of your welds quite a bit if you clean off the rust and mill scale and chamfer the ends
of the tubing. So here's all of the individual pieces laid
out, it's a bit tedious to prepare all this stuff but it saves quite a bit of time overall
when you're not going back and forth between cutting and drilling and welding. And now we can get to the fun part which is
welding all this up, starting with the first leg piece which is just a simple rectangle. I'm using my welding table to make all of
this a bit quicker and easier, and at the risk of repeating myself, I'll just say this
again, just because I have some fancy tools doesn't mean they're strictly necessary to
build this, I have definitely done some projects where you need fancy tools, but this is not
one of them. All you really need for this project in terms
of major tools is some way to cut metal tubing, a welding machine, some kind of drill, an
angle grinder, and maybe a circular saw or tracksaw for the wooden parts and then anything
on top mostly just makes things more convenient and sometimes quicker, but a lot of the tools
I use can be replaced with patience or skill. For the inside corner welds I actually like
to put this type of thing in a vise because that way you can orient the joints so that
you can weld them horizontally instead of vertically which usually gets you better results
especially with tig Next piece is the other leg which also includes
the shelf for the PC The ends of these pieces need to be capped,
and to do that I figured I can just use some of these cutoffs from the same tubing. They're a bit easier to weld than just a flat
piece and after welding them on I can just cut off the excess here and then grind the
edges a bit to make it look nice. Now I'm welding on some tabs that will hold
the board for the shelf and then these pieces get attached to the long piece I already welded up the outside frame here
so now I can add these two together while making sure the shelf ends up parallel to
the ground next are the upper side pieces which hold
the shelf and the back wall and once again there's two tubes with an open
end so I'm using the same technique as before to put caps on them so like I said the individual pieces are mostly
just steel rectangles which means it's relatively simple stuff in termns of welding it up, which
is why I'm not going into huge detail about the fabrication process here. This project definitely involves a pretty
big volume of work but none of it is super complex or requires special tools so if you
have the patience to see it through I think this could be built by most intermediate hobby
makers something like a garage shop. next up is this cross brace and this part
serves two purposes, first it stiffens out the whole frame sideways and holds the pack
panels but also this slot in the middle is designed to be the base for a sort of modular
attachment system which allows you to install different things to the back wall of the desk
and it also provides a way to route cables behind the back and you'll see how all that
works in detail a bit later. next up is the frame for the shelf which is
just another rectangle so lets not spend too much time on that with all the frame pieces done I did some
cleanup, mostly grinding the welds smooth in some of the more visible areas and since I don't like that flap disced look
I also used a scotch brite pad to kind blend in the areas where I used the grinder and
this also makes the surface look less shiny and a bit more uniform so with that the main frame pieces are actually
already finished which means we can do a little test assembly to see if everything fits. and at this point the whole thing is actually
still relatively managable because it's just a desk and I didn't use any heavy gauge tubing. next are gonna be some small additions to
the frame starting with these pieces that will hold the tabletop I'm putting slots in there because I'm going
to install a solid wood tabletop which needs to be able to contract and expand to prevent
the wood from warping, but if you use something like plywood or butcher block for the tabletop,
it would actually be fine to just drill holes instead. and I also decided to add leveling feet just
in case, so I did eventually end up drilling holes after welding next up is something pretty tedious but necessary,
I have to add a bunch of small tabs to the back that will hold the back panels. but there's actually a trick I've used before
to make this a little bit faster. after cutting all these little pieces on the
bandsaw I simply put a stack of them in a vise and temporarily weld them together on
one side and this way I can now handle them as one
piece so I only have to drill once instead of 8 times and then I just grind the weld down until
I can pluck them apart and do a bit of finishing and that way I ended up with a whole bunch
of these relatively quickly. next are the back panels themselves and there's
actually a lot of options here, as you saw in the beginning I decided to stick audio
foam panels on there which is why I'm using some super cheap thin plywood as a backing
material since it's not going to be see and isn't important structurally but you could also use a different material
for the back panels according to your taste or you could even leave them out altogether. since this desk is supposed to come apart
for transport, I'm using these threaded inserts for all the wooden parts, since if you screw
into the wood directly a few times, it might eventually wear out to the point where screws
wouldn't hold anymore and now for the foam, even though it has some
good properties for recording audio like I'm doing right now, I actually mostly picked
this stuff for the back panel because I just like how it looks and I wanted something with
an interesting texture instead of just a smooth back wall this stuff is fairly inexpensive online and
easy to cut just using a sharp boxcutter I'm using spray adhesive to glue these onto
the boards and to make sure they go on straight I glue one half first and then the other one unfortunately I couldn't find any place that
sells these in large enough sheets to do the whole backpanel with one piece, so I had to
use two for each panel, and I tried to line up and hide the seam in the middle as best
as possible but unfortunately it's still kind of visible which actually bugs the perfectionist
in me quite a bit but I also didn't think it's worth scrapping the whole thing over next is finishing the shelf so I'm cutting
the board for that and I always get a lot of questions about this material because it
seems to be very uncommon in the US but it's quite popular here in europe. it's basically a high quality plywood that
is laminated on both sides with a very durable surface that is also waterproof and it comes
in different colors but this dark brown is the most common one and I think fits quite
well with the look of this desk. this will just drop into the shelf frame and
be held by these strips of flat bar I'm gonna weld on and since I want this to sit perfectly
flush with the surface, I'm using a sacrificial cutoff from the same material as a spacer I'm only placing a few tack welds because
it's gonna be enough to hold some static weight so even though there's some smoke the board
isn't getting burned too bad. now we can install this into the frame again
and with that the major parts are finished but there's one small thing missing which
is a tabletop now, I don't consider myself much of a woodworker
but a friend of mine happend to have a whole stack of oak slabs in his workshop and I kind
of got talked into making a nice solid oak tabletop instead of just using plywood like
I was going to, so this footage is actually not from my own shop, and if you've watched
any woodworking content on youtube at all, you've probably seen this process of milling
crooked rough wood into nice straight wood at least a hundred times so I'm not going
to cover this in huge detail, but now you know how I ended up with these nice looking
pieces of oak here. another process you might have seen a bunch
of times is glueing something like this together to make a tabletop, but you probably have
never seen somebody use a welding table to do it, but it turns out it's pretty much the
perfect tool for that too. in retrospect I should have put something
between the table and the boards here because as I learned later there's some weird chemical
process that happens when oakwood and glue and metal come in contact, and among other
things it turns the wood glue black but as you'll see it ended up not being a big deal. after glueing and cutting it to length there
comes another youtube favorite which is sanding shots, needless to say this took forever because
oak is pretty hard but I ended up getting all of the weird looking glue sanded out on the front side I decided to keep the live
edge, which obviously is a matter of taste and I'm sure many people won't like it because
it's a bit overdone, but like I said I don't do much woodworking so when I do I figure
might as well have some fun with it and at least it's not an epoxy table I started preparing the edge by knocking off
all the loose bits with a wire wheel and then I went to town with the sander again, making
it smooth but while trying to keep the original flow of this edge and personally I quite like
the result, this edge has a nice flow to it and it just feels good to run your hand over
and it kind of breaks up all the boxy shape of the table a little bit. and then after some more sanding I finished
this with danish oil, the reason being that this is what I happend to have in the shop. I applies this on all sides and then let it
dry for one night and I think I applied 3 coats in total. and last but not least the tabletop also gets
the same inserts so it's easy to install. now we can finally bring this to the table
and all of a sudden it's actually starting to look like something. and the sun's coming out too. while I was at it I also prepared the board
for the shelf which is made from the same piece of wood so it gets the same treatment. next I'm gonna make the cable tray that goes
on the bottom I planned this thing to be pretty big on purpose
so that there's enough space in there for lots of cables and powerstrips and whatever
else you might want to hide and that's also the reason I chose this perforated
aluminum sheet for the material because this allows for good airflow so nothing will overheat
in there I cut this a bit larger than it needs to be
because before bending the actual shape I'm gonna fold over the ends to create a rounded
edge. Now I'm just doing two 90° bends and this
thin perforated sheet is fairly easy to bend so if you don't have a metal bender this can
also be done by clamping a piece of wood onto one side and then bending it over the edge
of a workbench next I'm welding up two U shaped parts from
some angle iron which will make up the sides of the frame so they go on like this and just to make sure
the sheet stays flat against the sides I'm sandwiching it in there by welding on some
little pieces of flat bar before attaching the sides together they each
get a thread for mounting and then both sides are connected using a piece of square tubing then I also put a few rivets in there just
for good measure these are the hinges that will connect this
to the table, just two pieces of a angle iron with a hole and now I can position this whole thing on
the lower cross brace here and weld on the hinges which makes sure everything ends up
in the right position and in case you're wondering why this even
has hinges instead of welding it on direcly, one reason was so it can be dissassembled
into smaller pieces, but the other idea is that you can actually tilt this whole cage
forward, just in case you ever do need to access this stuff from under the desk for
some reason, that way you can actually reach in from the front instead of accessing it
from the top. you saw in the beginning that the table also
has integrated lights and that's what we're gonna tackle next, so I'm removing the shelf
board again to install them I'm going to use some of those fairly common
and affordable RGB strips but instead of just sticking them on directly to the board I'm
gonna use these aluminum light profiles that are gonna make this look a lot nicer and these
have frosted covers which disperse the light a bit better but you can also get them with
clear covers. this one on the side here is actually not
gonna have any LEDs in it, I'm just gonna use this as a cable channel but for that it
needs two cutouts on the side first and then I also painted this one black to
hide it a little bit more now I can stick on the strips and these are
actually RGBW strips which means that in addition to the coloured LEDs, they also have dedicated
white leds, in this case warm white, and that gives you a much better white light when you
don't want crazy colors, compared to regular RGB strips which can only generate whit-ish
light by combining all three colours which usually gives off a pretty unpleasant light
that's not really white. the cables are gonna go through the back to
make them invisible and for that I need to add another hole, I always carefully deburr
these holes but there's probably gonna at least one comment saying this is super dangerous
because it's a metal frame but it's LED strips that run on 12v so even if one of these cables
was to get cut it's not gonna electrocute anyone. and of course now it's time for party desk in all seriousness though, I'm actually not
too into the whole RGB gaming look, I mostly just use the white lights but these strips
are so cheap it simply doesn't hurt anything to get one that also has the option of going
crazy with the colors. and overall it's just extremely useful to
have a nice uniform dimmable light integrated into the desk so there's no need for additional
desk lamps and as you can see, there's no visible cables
anywhere and the cable channel is pretty inconspicous, there's only one small problem which is that
the strips generate quite a bit of glare when sitting down at the desk, but that turned
out to be easy to fix by simply adding some small aluminum strips to the front which I
simply stuck on using double-sided tape, and these have just the right height to prevent
any direct glare without looking very noticable. we're almost done now but the desk is still
missing the cable access lid in the back here, so for that to be installed I first need to
add this steel divider to the tabletop which will then hold up one side of the lid using
these tabs. so to add the tabs to this piece of flat bar
I'm clamping it against the welding table because it actually isn't completely straight
horizontally which is often the case with hot rolled steel, so by doing this I can make
sure the lid is actually going to sit flush with the tabletop just like before I'm using a cutoff from the
same board as a spacer so that these sit at the right height and now this can be screwed against the back
of the tabletop and then I'm also adding a few more of those
to the sides and the back this board will be the lid and it has a little
slot in the back where you can stick your finger in to lift it out, but it can also
be used to have cables go through here's how it gets installed but it's still
missing a few holes for another feature because I'm going to install some USB hubs and power
outlets directly into this lid so this is what those hubs look like, you
can get these in all kinds of configurations with different connections and they usually
have a mounting diameter of 60mm which is a common standard for things like office and
conference desks. lastly I also installed some magnets into
the bottom of the board so it stays in place a bit better and I simply drilled a hole for
this that's half a milimetre undersized and then used my favorite pliers ever to just
press the magnets in for a friction fit. and I also oiled the edges of the plywood parts
just for good measure. there's only one thing left to do now which
is to build a solution to mount the monitor and speakers to the back wall of the desk. So I bought this flexible wall mount here
on amazon, there's tons of different models and this is one of the cheaper ones but I'm
quite happy with the quality. this is of course normally supposed to be
mounted to a wall so I'm going to create a sort of adapter since I specifically planned
the back of the desk so that different attachments can be mounted there depending on the use
case. I'm starting by just making a baseplate from
some flat bar and this plate would of course look a little different depending on which
model of wall mount you use since they come with different mounting plates but the general
principle is quite simple and can be easily adapted to mount almost anything to the desk now I'm just welding on an additional plate
that will engage in the slot in the back and the last thing is just this little plate
and two screws so it's pretty easy to build this and here's how this is installed so the idea with the slot is that you can
mount accessories anywhere you want depending on your use case, meaning you can also use
a dual or triple monitor setup and just place these accessories where you need them. and what's also nice is that you can still
adjust the position after mounting everything because it can require a bit of adjustment
to figure out where this needs to sit so your monitor ends up in the right spot the last thing I want to add is some shelves
for my speakers which will also be installed into the slot in the back and they're also
quite simple, just some L shaped pieces that will be connected with a board and I made
these to be the perfect size for my particular speakers but of course they can be made bigger
or smaller too. and just like the monitor arm these can be
positioned wherever you like and you could of course also just build more
of these to use them as shelves for different things. now that we're finally done the whole desk
has to come apart again to be transported there's only one last thing, I applied this
special oil to all the steel pieces, I used this before in many projects and although
it's oil, this stuff dries up after about 24 hours and forms an invisible layer that
protects against rust here's what all the parts look like disassembled
and although it is a lot of stuff, you can easily fit this into an average sized car
if you fold over the back seats so now we're back in my apartment and it's
time to do the final assembly which only takes about 20 minutes so the third hole here is for this retractable
powerstrip and I'm gonna show you how that works in a second to do this new desk justice and get a cleaner
looking setup I also decided to ditch my previous dual monitor setup and got this 38" ultrawide
monitor from LG. but as I said before you can of course also install multiple monitors
to this desk and I'm also gonna put links to all of the gadgets I'm installing here
in the description these monitor arms usually also have some
kind of cable management which makes the whole setup look even cleaner and here's also another
benefit of the back panel with the slot, because that's also where the monitor and speaker
cables can simply disappear and here's my favorite feature about this
desk, we've probably all hit our head a few times while crawling underneath some desk
trying to plug in some power supply but thanks to the cable tray, installing everything was
a breeze this time the USB hubs also have this hole in them so
they double as a way to pass cables down into the tray, in my case I want to keep the desk
as clean as possible so the only cable coming out here is the one for my phone charger of course there's a bunch of cables coming
out the back here now and to clean these up somewhat I'm just sticking on some flat cable
channels with double sided tape and that was actually the last step so the
desk is fully set up now which means it's time to show off the result of all this work before I end this video I just wanna quickly
go over all the features here. so first here's the cable management tray
again so on the left I installed a hub with four
usb 3 ports which are also fast charging ports, and on the right side there's a combination
hub that has two card readers, a usb C port, headphone and microphone jacks and another
two usb 3 ports I also bought this spiral USB C cable because
it doesn't look as messy as a normal cable so I usually just keep it plugged in here
and then I always have it handy whenver I need to charge my mouse or something and it also happens to be the right lenght
to charge my heaphpones while they're hanging from the shelf now here's that power strip again which also
installs into one of those 60mm holes. I can simply pull this out whenver I need
an outlet for something, and then when it's not in use it simply disappears, I think it's
a really neat idea and actually not too expensive and I'll put a link for that in the description
as well. you might have noticed there's also an additional
light here which is called a screenbar and these have become quite popular in recent
years. it's just a USB powered LED light that you
can stick onto your monitor and it projects a light in front of it but without causing
any glare or reflections in the screen and you can also set the color temeprature and
brightness. and it's a great addition with this setup
because it allows me to light the area in front of the screen independently from the
rest, so if I want I can use RGB lights just as an ambient light for the background and
still have neutral light for the work area. on top of that, this monitor also happens
to have an integrated LED ring which creates all kinds of fancy effects so with all these
combined there's a ton of ways of getting different light setups for either work or
just hanging out. then there's of course the monitor arm which
can be set up for all kinds of positions and these always have a certain minmum gap between
the screen and the wall and that's why I designed the desk to be relatively long from front
to back, this gives you a lot of freedom to set the distance from the monitor to the front
edge of the desk however you like it what I really like is that since there's no
monitor stand or tabletop mounted arm in the way, whenver I need some space on the desk
it only takes a second to free up a huge area by just tucking the mouse and keyboard under
the screen I also now finally have a decent spot where
my 3D printer can live and do its thing, and also a bunch of shelf space to put some office
stuff and some of my dying plants and speaking of it, if you wondered about
the headphone hangers, I 3d printed those specifically for this desk you can simply
stick as many as you need on to the front edge of the shelf so now my headphones also
have a dedicated parking space. and one small thing I noticed is that the
front edge is also a great place to put notes and todo lists using magnets one last custom addition I made off screen
is this microphone arm, or rather the mounting solution for it. this arm usually mounts to the desktop but
I wanted to keep that clean so I came up with something to mount it to the shelf, I turned
this cylinder here and welded it onto the end of the arm and it then goes into this
block I machined which can mount anywhere to the edge of the shelf and then when I need the microphone I can
pull it down from above so nothing is cluttering the tabletop and there's no cables hanging
anywhere, and when it's not needed it can also be moved out of the way completely. that's it for this one, I am really glad I
built this and personally I think I can never go back to using a normal desk and maybe I
could inspire a few of you to build your own version. If you liked this content you can support
me by subscribing or joining my patreon or getting the plans or a shirt or even by trolling
in the comments. and as always thanks for watching and see
you next time.
