Making a Burning LAVA GAMING DESK

about a month ago I found these really cool highly figured Elm slabs that I knew I needed for a project that didn't exist yet these cookie slabs are filled with waves and burls and character and I knew I couldn't leave them behind once I saw them at Backwoods Timber and Listowel [Music] not knowing what I was going to do with these yet I still knew I was gonna have to clean them up for whatever project I decided on so I started removing any leftover bark and dirt using a chisel oh and a wire wheel on my grinder and a wire brush [Music] with my two slabs all cleaned up I headed home to do some research and figure out what I actually want to build here after scouring the YouTube DIY section for a while oh [ __ ] that'd be cool I found this really cool Russian video where this guy put LED lights in an epoxy table to basically make it look like lava is flowing through the table and 25 million views on this video is enough for me to completely rip off this idea in my own style so I have a sheet of half inch melamine that I'm going to use to build up the form for the epoxy [Music] [Applause] so using my Kreg track saw jig I cut these pieces to size having two larger base pieces and then a bunch of these three inch strips that I'm going to use for the walls if you're a real regular viewer of my channel you also notice that I move shop spaces and that's because my dad bought way too many old cars and I had no space to work and I have some pretty big projects coming up so I decided to just rent my own shop it's a big step considering I'm now 28 and still live in my parents basement [Music] so I have all my side wall pieces cut up and now I'm going to screw these into the base pieces and I'm going to do that using some pocket holes so I'm using my Kreg pocket hole jig so that I can sink a screw into these walls every couple feet or so [Music] before I screw down these walls I'm going to add a bead of silicone caulking to the bottom Edge and this is just to make sure the epoxy stays inside the form and doesn't leak all over my new shop so I just screwed these walls in using some one-inch pocket hole screws [Music] and I'm building up two forms because I'm gonna make this a desk with a waterfall Edge so basically the one leg of the desk is gonna look pretty much the same as the desktop so it's going to be built the exact same way just smaller once the forms were all screwed together I added another bead of silicone along the Inside Edge and used my finger to smooth it out [Music] before I started cutting up these really cool slabs and making a mistake I went in Photoshop and moved around the design until I found something that I liked and then I had that on my phone so I could Market the slabs and start cutting them up using my tracks up [Music] these slabs are two and a quarter inches thick so after I did a pass with the track saw I had to take the track away and then do another quick pass with just the sauce that it would cut through the remaining slab [Music] [Applause] [Music] once I had the large pieces the slab in place I used some of these spare cut offs and filled in some of the Dead Space [Applause] [Music] so before I get to pouring any epoxy I'm going to take some of this West system epoxy and just go around all the corners and edges of my slabs this helps seal them up so that they aren't releasing air bubbles once I do the deep pour which will save me a bunch of work in the long run and produce an overall better result with less air bubbles in it thank you [Music] the next day that epoxy is hardened up so I'm just taking some 120 grit sandpaper and scuffing up the edges a bit so that the new epoxy I pour will form a mechanical bond with this epoxy so now I'm bringing the two Farms into this handy little room this job has so I can keep as much dust out of it as possible and then I'm spending a good amount of time to level up this table in every direction as much as possible before I put any of the wood back in place I used this epoxy mold release to give the whole form a good overall spray you don't need to go overboard with this and you definitely don't need to pull it on I just give it a good light spray from about a foot away and make sure everything's covered and then the table once it's fully cured should pop out of this mold fairly easily versus if it didn't have the mold release on it [Music] for my deep epoxy I'm using the slow Q casting epoxy from Rusty design in Burlington Ontario but you can really use any epoxy designed for casting I just use this because it's cheap and I know it works so I mixed this up according to the manufacturer's directions and then I just mix this by hand because I find that introduces less air bubbles than a drill mixer so I'll just throw on some music and make sure I mix for like two full songs at least so this is the same epoxy I'm going to use for this whole table pour but for now I'm just gonna pour about a quarter inch on the bottom so that my lava stone and LED lights aren't poking out the bottom of the epoxy in the final product thank you [Music] once I had roughly the right amount poured I used the stick with a quarter inch line on it to gauge How deep the epoxy is all around the form and make any level adjustments needed I also have this extra for my whipped up quick and then I poured in about a half inch of just straight epoxy and you'll see why in a minute but for now we'll just let that set up for a few days foreign [Music] a few days later that's fully cured so I'm just scuffing up that fresh epoxy with some 120 grit again [Music] and then I have these outdoor LED strip lights from Govi this entire strip is enclosed in this silicone casing that's fully waterproof so I'm hoping this should be good enough to cast the LEDs within the epoxy and not get any leaks until the epoxy hardens up in a couple days so I'm drilling a hole into the bottom of the form of both pieces that I can feed an individual LED strip into each one [Music] then I just temporarily clamped the strip up to the wall and silicone the hole shut you want to really take your time in this part because if there is any leak at all the epoxy is going to find its way through also be sure you're using silicone caulk because as everybody knows not just any [ __ ] will do now back to that extra form of epoxy I poured first I demolded it and now I really just have this half inch thick sheet of epoxy [Music] so I sanded it down and then I'm cutting it into some two inch strips and then I'm going to use these strips to case in around the edges of the form for basically the same reason why I poured that first quarter inch layer this will set back in the interior components of the epoxy and give me some cut space for the final product that way I don't have to cut through the lava stone and fire glass and LED lights that I'm about to add also I know these look really frosted and like they'll stand out in the final product but as soon as the fresh epoxy touches this it's going to turn them completely invisible so then I just worked on sticking the LED strips around the edges of all the slabs when there was no slab to stick to I just stuck it right onto that base quarter inch layer of epoxy I poured [Music] for the smaller piece the 30 foot light strip was way too long so I just cut it down to size and you can pretty much cut these led strips wherever you want then I made sure to close up the end really thoroughly with some silicone and then put the silicone cap over top that originally came on the end of the strip [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so this is some tempered glass that's usually used in like fire tables and that kind of thing but I'm hoping I can use this and then the LED light shining through it to make it look like a perfect lava substitute [Applause] [Music] the nice thing about these led strips too is that they're fully programmable on my phone and I can change the pattern or even develop my own pattern at any time to make it look more flowing and natural once I had all the glass in place I just used the scrap piece of lumber to go around and make sure all the stones were sitting at good three quarter inches below the top of the wood so that I have some room to Plane off the top once it's finished [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] about four days later that's fully set up and rock hard so I'm gonna demold this so I just took out the screws on the walls and then hit them free with a mallet now I want to essentially plane these pieces that they have a perfectly flat and smooth top that I can then finish with some wood finish since this is full of tempered glass and LED lights I figured no professional planer would touch this so here I'm just whipping up a quick rotor sled rig using some MDF door jambs they were the straightest thing I could find at the hardware store and I want this to be perfectly flat top so once I set the first slab in place I just went around taking some measurements of the spacing making sure they were all within about a 30 second of an inch of each other and then making any adjustments as necessary [Music] [Applause] so I'm using this inch and a half surfacing bit in my two and a half horsepower rotor you're going to need a router with some good horsepower just a little handheld is not going to do for this job [Music] so I basically just worked my way across the slab taking about one inch bytes at a time I did two or three passes over the slab in total taking off maybe a sixteenth of an inch on each pass this was enough to get me through that epoxy top layer and back down to the raw wood it also wasn't quite deep enough to hit any of the glass that's encased inside the epoxy which is a pretty important part eyes [Music] and after pretty much a full day of doing one of the messiest jobs I have ever done the end result looks pretty good it just needs a good belt sanding first I'm going to remove that backing Board of the mold that's still stuck to the piece so use my oscillating multi-tool to cut around the light input [Music] and then the backing sheet pops off pretty easily thanks to that mold release then I just carefully cut in towards that original hole trying not to cut through the light and ruin the piece and that worked out a lot better than I thought it was going to because there's really no information on casting LED lights in epoxy oh I solo lifted this tabletop that weighs about the same as me over to the floor [Music] and I'm going to cut all the final edges around the piece so I just use my Kreg track saw jig again along with a regular old circular saw and cut the pieces as straight as possible once again the slab was still too thick for the track so I just took the track away and made a quick second pass with just the circular saw the cut was already 95 percent of the way through so I really didn't have to pay too much attention it was automatically Guided by the path of least resistance [Music] so now I have this old belt sander that I bought when I was probably like 15 for 30 or 40 bucks and it's still kicking today foreign so I gave the whole thing a good belt sanding with some 80 grit and then I switched over to my oscillating sander and worked my way up from 80 to about 120 just to get an idea of where this piece is sitting [Applause] [Music] and after sanding for a while it looks so good I decided to fully finish up a spot as a test finish just to see if this piece is going to look the way I want it to [ __ ] [Applause] so pretty much the worst happened and I wasn't paying attention and I tripped over the cord and ripped it and literally the worst spot it possibly could have ripped Moment of Truth damn it I spent over two hours trying to re-solder the connections with no luck so I'm left with no choice but to go in from the bottom and try to Route these lights out and put in some fresh ones I have absolutely no idea if this will work because I'm trying to go through some tempered glass and that's pretty notorious for being hard and difficult to cut through kind of my motto the whole time was don't break the [ __ ] cable because I had no backup plan prepared so some of it came out fairly easily where I didn't have to go through too much glass but when I did it really ate up the bits like nothing [Music] after pretty much a full day and another messy job and burning up about 200 in rotor bits I did finally get it out and I'm ready to add in some fresh LEDs [Music] so that actually worked out pretty good considering for a while I was pretty sure this video was never going to see the light of day so I got back to my sanding process and I sanded everything up to 120 Grit [Music] it was time to fill in any little gaps or cracks left by surfacing with the router so I have this CA glue and accelerator so this is basically just super glue that I used to fill in the voids [Music] spray it with this accelerator and it fully hardens up in like under 30 seconds and it's ready to work with and sand again so I spent a good amount of time doing this making sure I get every little Gap and crack and then I'll use this backhoe hand planer to take off the CA glue as much as possible and then I'll sand over top of that I use that hand planer to take off the majority of the CA glue and then let the sander finish it up mainly because if I sanded down the whole thing it would take a lot longer and it'd be a lot more of an inconsistent finish because you'd be sanding the wood at the same time that you're trying to get rid of that higher CA glue part and ultimately causing some Distortion and non-flatness now with everything filled up and sanded back to 120 grit I'm going to do something about this hard Square Edge I want it to still be fairly Square so I'm using a very little 1 16 of an inch round over bit on my trim router that's just enough just to take off this sharp point but it still looks like a square Edge from the distance it's back to sanding for the finish I'm using I'm sanding everything up to 220 grit and I'm really taking my time on this making sure I get a consistent sanding pattern on every grip before moving on to the next then I'm just using some mineral spirits on a shop towel to wipe off as much of the dust as I can [Music] and then once that's fully dried up it's time to finish these pieces so I was considering doing an epoxy top coat but to be honest this piece is for me and I'm not a huge fan of the super glossy epoxy look so I'm going to use a finish I use a lot called Rubio monocoat it's really easy to use finish you just mix the two parts together at a three to one ratio and then I just drizzle some over top of the table top and then use a white applicator pad to work it into every square inch of the piece [Music] I'll just let that sit for a minute or two and then I come back with a Terry towel and try to wipe off as much of a finish as possible this takes some elbow grease and quite a few Terry towels but the ultimate goal is to have none of the Rubio left on the surface and that'll leave you with a really nice protected kind of medium Sheen finish [Music] now it's time to put this thing all together so I flipped it up over upside down and put the leg piece into place and I'm gonna take a lot of trash talking from The Woodworking Community for this but I'm just going to use these eight inch brackets to hold these together that you can get at Home Depot or wherever so I marked those out and then pre-drilled the holes and notice I put a little flag on my drill bit so I don't accidentally come out through the top [Music] and then I'm just going to use these quarter inch lag bolts to secure this into place for some reason the woodworking community on YouTube absolutely hates the use of any standard Hardware or lag bolts so do your worst I got pretty thick skin and this is going to work just fine [Music] with all the tempered glass and the epoxy I wasn't able to drill into it so I just left these open but I still got most of the bolts in [Music] now in an Ideal World I would have made the other leg the same as the one that I already made but I didn't have enough lumber for that to be possible so I'm just making a leg up in the same dimensions with this one by two inch steel tubing [Music] [Applause] I then have this cheap flux core welder I got a Canadian Tire for like 200 bucks 10 years ago and I'd cut all the tube in with a 45 degree angle using my chop saw so now I'm going to weld that together [Music] that's probably the best weld I've ever done and then I'm just using my angle grinder to take down the not so pretty welds because that one I showed you was by far the best foreign then I switched out the grinding disc for 120 grit sanding disc and gave the whole thing a good finish sanding and removed any grinding marks and rust [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I'm going to fit this to the table before I take it to be painted so I just marked out three holes and then drilled them through with the hole slightly larger than the bolts themselves and then I set this back in place and used that same drill bit just to barely touch the wood so that I could Mark the center point where I need to drill in the wood [Applause] [Music] then I used some more quarter inch lag bolts a little bit longer this time and some washers to secure that leg in place who needs rampa inserts anyway since everything fit perfectly I took the lag off and took it over to get a couple coats of some semi-gloss spray paint this should have had some primer under it too but I was all out in my shop and I had to leave shortly after this so I just put on the normal coat it's just for me anyway so hey who cares the next day I drilled some holes for these adjustable feet so that I can level the desk perfectly [Music] now the actual desk itself is pretty much done but one last thing I'm doing is I have this scrap three quarter inch sheet of maple plywood and I just cut this strip off a bit and I'm going to put a few pocket holes along it [Music] mess with some Maple Edge banding [Music] and then after I gave it a good sand up to 180 grit I've stained it with a stain that makes it look somewhat similar in color to that Elm that's inside the desk then I'm just going to use some pocket hole screws to screw this about six inches from the back edge of the desk [Music] and then I'm going to put some Power Bars and stuff back here and it's just going to be a hidden place to hide all of these cables for the desk and the computer and that's this build complete I'm surprised it's still in working order [Music] one last thing I'm going to add is this AI gaming sync box from Govi as well so basically you just take the HDMI cable from the computer and plug it into this box and then another HDMI cable feeds from the box into the Monitor and then this reads the video signal and sends that information to some Led backlights that are mounted on the back of the monitor as well as these two desk lights so essentially the colors that are at the edge of the screen get extended off by these lights onto the wall behind and just makes this really cool immersive experience thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so this was a pretty damn cool build and honestly even without the lights on the table still looks great but with all the lights on it brings it into a whole nother level so my original lava effect obviously looks the best but I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of the scenes pre-programmed into the Gobi app still look pretty good even coming through the red fire glass I could even sync this up with the desk lights and have them play the same colors or sync it up with some music and sound effects so that's about it for this video thanks so much for watching and if you haven't already hit the Subscribe button because I have some pretty big builds coming up next also I made a couple of these shirt prototypes with a logo from a family-friendly content website and I'm going to give two of these away to my viewers all you have to do is follow me on Instagram and I'll pick two people randomly a week from today I also just released this design on my merch website and a link in the description below I'm also going to give away this Govi AI sync box light that I used in this video this is going to be my work computer and it's going to be set up in a different room and I really don't need these lights so I'd rather give them to somebody that can actually use them same deal as the t-shirts follow me on Instagram and I'll pick someone randomly a week from today and these kits are worth 400 bucks just FYI again thanks so much for watching and I'm excited to get rid of my old desk and do some work of this sweet thing or maybe I'll sell it make me an offer

Channel: Drew Builds Stuff

Views: 2,500,069

Keywords:

Id: deNvjFTeJfE

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023