 This isn't the first time we've done a father-son PC build online as Tech Tips. It's not the first time we've done a multi-part video, and it's not the first time I have mounted a computer to a desk. But I assure you that today's video is very different from anything you've seen on this channel before. This collaborative project has been a long time coming with many helpers, and the result, and I think you'll all agree, was totally worth the effort. Welcome to Ultimate DIY Desk PC. Ravpower's 22,000 mAh portable charger can charge up to three devices at once, while being the size of an average smartphone. Check it out at the link in the video description. Let's begin with the objective. There are a lot of desk PC builds out there, and even prefabbed desk PC cases, but they all share at least one trait, the price. Some are expensive due to their use of premium materials, while others are expensive because they require a well-stocked workshop and a lot of time to build them. This is different. What we're building is a from-scratch design that we're calling the LTT-D1. It's short for desk one. A complete desk PC case that you can make yourself with a single piece of MDF, a couple of saws, and a piece of glass. Let's start at the beginning. The first plan was to buy a cheap table from IKEA or off Craigslist, then build the rest of the materials around that. We rejected that because almost nothing we did would be applicable to someone trying to replicate the project. So we started working from the other end. What do all sick-looking desk PCs have in common? A big piece of glass. So with some careful measurements, you can easily adapt our design to whatever glass top you can find secondhand. This is a big key for this project because thick, tempered glass that's designed to sit without being fully supported, the kind that you should use for safety, is not cheap. So our glass measured 29.75 inches by 57.375 and cost us 40 bucks for the entire table on Craigslist. We just discarded the legs and got to work. Now to keep costs down, the objective was to build the desk out of a single piece of MDF. Plywood is another valid material choice here. It's stronger, but we wanted a smooth, clean look, something that might not matter to you. So here are the plans we used. You can see here that the largest cut of wood is the bottom piece that will be covered by the top glass. Just please note that if you want your glass to sit flush with the wooden box around all the edges, you'll need to add three quarters of an inch on every side to account for the thickness of the material used to build the sides. We attached them in this manner to hide what would otherwise be unattractive seams around the outside of the desk. For the rest of the cuts you see here, we have a cutoff saw and a table saw, so we can work as we go. But if you don't, you can get your local building supply store to cut them for you, starting with the smallest pieces so the operator will have more to hold on to. Officially, it costs a dollar per cut, but some places will do more for free if you come in at a time when they're not busy. Another sort of error that we made was in the height of the box. We made it exactly the right height for side-mounted 120mm fans, then decided after the fact that we wanted a three quarter inch lip around the edge for LED lighting effects. But it ended up working out anyway because we changed our mind about radiator mounting. The next important measurement is one of the coolest things about this design, the knee cutout. You can do pretty much whatever you want here, but the general idea is to avoid the awkward arm position that a thick table usually forces the user into. We started using a jigsaw with a ruler to guide it, but, and this would have worked for plywood, because we aren't using plywood, it made our blade bend and it actually worked okay, actually better to just draw a line and eyeball it. My dad wanted perfection though, and since he already owns a table saw, he brought that over to fix it up. So our knee cutout kind of got bigger and bigger. This was probably the hardest part of building the desk, but if you have it pre-cut for you, you shouldn't run into that. Next up is the sides of the box. We originally tried to nail these on, but discovered that without pre-drilling, it wasn't going to work very well due to the crumbly nature of MDF. The good news is that with wood glue and clamps, this stuff stays together astonishingly well. Spoiler alert, the entire end product is held together without a single screw or nail. Next up is the legs. One nice thing about building your own custom desk is that you can have the height perfect for yourself. We went with a 29 inch height from the top of the glass to the floor for our isosceles triangle reinforced legs. The assembly here is a little tricky. You put the leg components together like so. Then when the glue is grabbing a bit, but not hard, it'll be about this color. You can wipe off the excess. Then we position the legs at an angle for a bit of extra strength. They're supported at the top by those trapezoid shapes. An additional brace here between them down lower though would be a good idea, but it's not exactly weak without it. Next up is the optional LED lip. These are just thin strips of wood that we clamped in place around the outside edge to allow us to light up the inside of the case without being able to directly see the LEDs. You can actually get pretty perfect seams by wiping the glue at the right moment during the drying process. But as you can see, ours isn't, so in part two we may have to address that somehow. But how does all the hardware go in? Well, it actually took us a while to figure that out. Big deal. Well you just go like that. That's awful. Isn't that what you want? Everything about what you just did there is awful. Isn't that what you want? Well, I'm not sure yet. Let's just kind of, let's back up for a second here. I think the things- We could have cable holes. I think the things should be centered and we might just have to use extensions for the connectors that we need. Where's the power supply going? I don't know. Well, what's going to go over here though? That's sort of a concern right now. Is this just going to be like a diorama of like gaming figurines? Like what are we going to put here? What about hard drives? Uh, SATA cables that far? I'm not sure if that's a very good idea. Well, right there. So what's going on with the legs? Well, you guys didn't have a preference so we decided to angle them for beauty. Yeah. So the desk itself will be beautiful, but the computer might not be in there. You guys really should have thought this through first. You know what, Vaughn? Finding you kind of unsupportive right now. Hey, I helped your dad build this desk. That's true. Pretty supportive. That's true. That's supportive. He did most of the work, sorry. Yes. Yes, we know he did do that. Okay. All right. So hold on. Let's just... Can we put that guy right there and then the cables can have like a nice like thing that comes here and splits it. Okay. So we're thinking, but again, we are now officially out of components to put over there. We still have hard drives. We still have reservoirs. But your reservoirs are really small. No, we can't put hard drives over there, Jake. We can't run a SATA cable that's like 15 miles long. Right, so why don't we put the hard drives. Where are we going to put the hard drives then? Hold on, let's not get too far away from ourself from what's going on here. So power supply can go out and up and up and up to where that needs to go. So that's fine. Then, sorry. We need to get a mini one for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but cable model do completely custom lights. I'll just send them exactly what we need. Then for, this is stuff that I'm actually kind of worried about though. Like how do you have an extender? We do? Yes. Why don't you put this here. Go like this. Because you're still interfering. No, you're still. No, you're still going to hit it. Instead of using hard drives, we could just use SSDs. Are you sure? Hold on Jake, we might be okay here. My dad might have solved the problem. Are we planning to do hard pipe? We can measure up to the bottom. Do you want to do hard pipe? I don't think we really need to. It might look kind of ghetto if we don't. So we could do these here. We could go pump, pump. And then we could go res, res. We still end up with some, oh you know what, no. So we go like res, res. And then we go, how many hard drives are there? Like four. Are they SSDs? I don't think we have a choice on that one. So basically we go up and we bring this pump up. No, we can't. We can't bring the pump up. No, no, that's fine. Because we want to hit the top of it. So we go up to the top of this pump. Then, how are we going to, how are we going to have a right angle thing? But there are still, there's still the challenge of IO. So power button, I think is pretty, I think is pretty straightforward. We just need to find like a couple cool LEDs and power buttons that we can put in the wood at the front right. Or we could just do, we could just do a hole and then just have a piece of, have a piece of wood that just comes out to cover the cables that are plugged in. Yeah, okay. And we just make it that simple. So basically we would just glue a piece of wood right here. Yeah, it would be a little tough, but honestly it wouldn't be. Once it's mounted. Okay, so if that's the case, then we'll do the exact same thing here. And then we'll do the exact same thing here. So actually, would we, okay, so how about this then? Would we just cover? Okay, so we have a plan now. And it only took until after the desk was already basically finished being constructed. Ha ha, planning. Anyway, so IO is going to go here. That's good because I'm right handed and it's good because the user is going to sit right about here-ish. Kind of back a little bit. You won't really see that. So we're going to just bring our power button, front USB, blah, blah, blah, etc. A couple LEDs right up there. Then CPU and GPU are both going to have tubing going between them and then over across here. We're going to try and do hard line tubing. Wish me freaking luck with this one. Anyway, the point is you're going to get over to these radiators. They're going to go to their pumps. And both of these pumps are going to be able to draw air directly from a reservoir, meaning that we're not going to have issues with bleeding the loop. Something that I have definitely had to deal with in the past. These fans are going to have white chromax corners. So we're going to have like a black and white color scheme kind of thing going on in here. And in terms of power, we're going to use custom cable mod cables to go up, over to here, over to here, over to here, similar to my last Desk BC. And then we're going to have, we're going to use this lip under here. See that? It goes all the way around the outside to run power to these drives. And we're also going to have cable mod SATA cables over to these drives from this direction. And then we're going to run power over to the pumps and fans over here, hiding them under the lip as best we can. The other thing we're going to run around the entire outside is RGB LED strips. Though, don't worry, we're not just going to go one solid strip around the whole thing and make it like a light show inside. We're going to use extensions to create gaps. So we're just accent lighting the right pieces. That was my idea. Jake was not responsible for that at all. And, uh, I mean, yeah, oh, right, right, right, last thing. So shroud, my dad says it's pretty simple to kind of go over here and then down and then over. So all we're going to do is put some holes in the side so you can access your I.O. That makes this setup a little bit more flexible for the future. Like, oh, I don't necessarily want to use DisplayPort anymore. Like if we used extensions to get over there or something. No, no, no, we're just going to have holes you can reach in. You can do whatever it is you need to do. The keen-eyed among you are probably asking yourselves, G-Linus, well, you've got a bunch of exhaust fans. Where are you drawing air in? To which my reply is, don't worry about it. We have taken away the top. We're not going to put a piece of glass on it anymore. New idea. Monitor balance is here. Okay. Keyboard goes kind of right here, kind of across here for stability while gaming. Mouse, get this. You are going to use the top of the water block of the video card, making you the world's biggest badass. That's stupid, isn't it? Yes. Okay. So no, the piece of glass is still going over top, but what we're going to do is we're either going to use, like, these Silverstone filters, or maybe we'll do like a custom sort of larger mesh, and we're going to do one intake right here. So because we're using high static pressure fans over on the other side, we're actually going to have a pretty decent amount of airflow sucked through that filtered intake, across the motherboard, down towards the power supply, and over here, and then out, down here over on the left. And that is how we do it when we plan everything after the fact. Oh yeah, I didn't even explain the disaster almost that was the radiators. So not having given my dad any guidance, in fact I said specifically I didn't care, he did these cool angled feet under the desk that almost made it impossible for us to mount these radiators over here. That's why they're kind of offset like this, but it ended up looking like, yeah, we meant to do that. So maybe we'll just leave this clip out, and then you'll never know that we didn't mean to do that. Because that's how video works, kids. So the last thing here is we're doing a quick test fit of the glass. You can see the quarter inch extra that we have around. Now at this stage in the game, you have a couple of options. You could rebuild your table, or you can actually just get glass that is custom made to fit exactly. But we're probably not going to worry about that for the purposes of this video. What I did want to say though is now that we've got this on here, we've realized, you know, you can, even with paint, and even with sanding, like you're going to see some of this. So an optional step at this stage would be to put some kind of a veneer over top of here, so you don't really see all these joins. It might make it look a little sharper. And then to keep the glass from slipping and moving around, you might also want to consider putting like maybe like a roll-on clear silicone around the edge, so that once you put it down, it kind of sticks in place. We'll let the silicone dry first. So it's just a grippy, like a grippy texture around the outside. So you'd actually be able to lift it straight off. You just won't be able to slide it. So this chair is a little tall. That's not how high the chair will be, but check it out. The knee gap is right there. Boom! That's freaking awesome. Okay, so we're going to cover some of these imperfections, like right there. So this is optional. You don't really need to do this because you could have just painted that. And once you put the sort of friction surface, like silicone or some rubber surface, you wouldn't see these little marks anyway. But we decided to go with a little bit of a near. So that's optional. So anyway, the test fit with the glass looks awesome, other than the calculation error with the outside edge. So the next step then is to see if we can get around our half-assed planning and get all the components actually mounted inside. Stay tuned for part two. I did say it was going to be a multi-parter. But maybe you don't want to build a desk computer. Maybe you want to build a beautiful functional website. Well, don't worry. We've got that taken care of too. Squarespace.com is the place to go if you want to do that thing that I just said, the one with the website, not the one with the computer. They offer 24-7 support via live chat and email. Their templates look great across any device, and it is super easy to use. It starts at only $12 a month, and you get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for the year. They've got tons of great features, including their logo designer, a commerce module that comes with every website, and cover pages, a feature that lets you set up a beautiful one-page online presence in a matter of minutes. More than that, everyone can now publish content in Apple News format directly from their Squarespace blog module, making it available to millions of potential readers, which isn't to say that if your content is garbage, people will necessarily read it, but at least there's that potential. So you can start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today by going to Squarespace.com. Then, when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure you're using offer code LTT so you can save 10% off your first purchase. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured, I mean, MDF, at Amazon, in the video description, maybe we'll put the hardware that we're going to put in the system in there. Anyway, also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on Channel Superfund.