Building My Kid's a Dream Gaming Desk

[Music] okay so my oldest boy jack is obsessed with video gaming he that's all he talks about and the problem is he's really really good at it and i promised him that one day i'll help him start like a streaming gaming channel i could do it with him so i thought what better way to kick it off was by building him the ultimate gaming desk okay so what i have here is three quarter inch acacia wood it's hard wood that's already laminated together they sell this at home depot and lowe's 160 bucks a sheet we're gonna have two tiers to our desk and i'm gonna start cutting this up this is a far cheaper alternative than actually started gluing everything up the dimensions are gonna be 54 inches wide i don't need this desk to be too wide but the height will be your standard 29.5 inches these are gonna be side profile the legs now in order to do that we first need to start chopping this up on the table saw we have our bottom tabletop congratulations we did a thing i want to have a second top on top to hold the monitor now because this is a perfect length i need it to match the grain so i'll cut it in half and glue it side by side now the end to end grain glues are not the strongest but this is not going to hold too much weight and we'll reinforce it so if you're wondering how am i going to reinforce them so you can use couple of ways uh if you don't have this fancy machine which is called the domino from festool what it does is it creates a mortise which is a hole and you can buy these pre-made tenons and it shoves in there precisely tight and then you can clamp them glue them together and it's a very strong joint if you don't have it it's pretty pricey you get a biscuit joint it's i think you know one for like 60 bucks i'm gonna match book them or match these two sides as best as i can put my little markers down then my use my fest tool and plunge that hole through put some wood glue put the tenon in and put some clamps and we have a table top for the monitor uh so now we're gonna do the legs the legs are gonna be mitered in a square so in order to achieve that we have to continue this grain pattern it'll be six inches wide so we're gonna throw it on table saw and rip as many as we can we technically need eight if we can get eight we should be looking good but first let's talk about the sponsor of today's video hunting clash hunting clash is a first purter hunting shooting game i am an avid hunter that i've taken my hunter safety course years and years ago when i was younger and i'm excited to actually have a game that i can play on my phone whenever i'm not working the game is super intuitive and easy to follow once the sights are on you can clearly use this little navigation tool to look around see where the animals are i see this big beautiful mule buck right there boom we got 100 precision i got 23 points and it's really educational because shows like okay this is the mule deer you took an ethical shot this is the weapon the you have the statin t4 hunter that you start with you can see the zoom the height accuracy and of course as you advance as time goes on you can start here's a malice precision shooter go head-to-head with other fisher throughout events every week and hunting clash is offering a special promotion for my followers here if you hit the link in description to download the app which is available on ios and android use my gift code to redeem it hunt with alex and you'll get 100 gold 70 skills tokens to upgrade your preferred skill and get more points when hunting one mythical lure from the grizzly bear in montana so you can hunt bigger animals one mythical lure from the mountain lion in montana so you can hunt bigger animals all this for a total value of 15 only available to new players hunting glass is a very fun game especially for an outdoorsman like myself you will really enjoy it as much as i do there is a link description for you to download the app or use the qr code that's on the screen use my gift code hunt with alex one more time and a big thank you to hunting class for sponsoring this video now let's get back into this video let's go i got all these pieces cut up at six inches i'm gonna do the side legs here we will do miters on the corners 45 degrees we'll just glue them up put a little brad nail to hold in place and then clamp them tight it's going to look so much better than just a basic butt joint but kind of tread with your own skill set i'm going to cut these up real quick on a miter throw them up together learning a lot of things i hope you guys like this stuff make sure you check out my patreon account i have extended versions of my videos of stuff that doesn't make it to these youtube channels that are 18 minutes these are like hour long unedited stuff director's cut stuff that you can take and uh because people are always like you talk too fast well there's extra and extended stuff and be excited to help support this channel and i keep making stuff with you guys let's go we're getting ready to glue up these miters they could be a little tricky glued up because you know they're gonna move around so the best way i found this to work is if you flip them over and put tape along all these seams flip it over again now you'll be able to roll it close together once that's in place with glue glue we'll use a ratchet strap around it to clamp the pressure evenly together and keeping sure that it's straight and not you know caddy wampus out that's not a real word huh pretty good at making importance all right so these puppies have dried overnight now we have to spice them up a little bit being a gaming desk you got to make it look like a gaming desk which means a lot of leds what i want to do is i want to carve a channel down the middle of because this is going to be the face and this is the other face middle of these legs and then i want to carve a channel along the edge of the table top itself and the edge of the monitor tabletop as well so it'll be kind of like this electron looking thing i'm going to use a dado stack and what a dado stack is is a bunch of assortment of blades you put together based off of this little cheat sheet of how thick you need it we're gonna go with half inch so this right here is called a feather board and what that does is it helps keep whatever you're feeding through up against the fence so it's not coming out when it comes out away from the fence it's not a good straight cut oh one more thing i just realized so as i proceed one corner there might be a tear out on the part that i'm coming out of maybe it'll happen maybe i'll now this is not the sharpest set of dado blades i have i'm gonna put tape around every edge that i'm going to do this on and they'll definitely give me a better chance to have a nice cleaner cut [Music] i'm liking this design so much that even with that leds you can guarantee that you'll see me building some kind of table legs with just putting these kind of grooves in it just let me know do you guys like it in the comment section i'd love to hear you guys think about it i'm going to start ripping off the remainder pieces uh to just kind of elevate it create a way to secure it okay so we're going to attach the spacers i just had to go with two instead of one just because one's kind of a little too basic and i feel like it's kind of strong to make it easy i'm just going to put a couple of pilot holes put a couple of screws from here in with wood glue and then we'll do bracketing to secure the top to keep you know wood movement and all that stuff play all right so this is the idea of the desk it looks so cool i love the side profile i love that this is raised and then this is going to be the top monitor piece the monitor sits right there i bought these led lights on amazon i wanted specifically to be like a three-way thing meaning there's three different independent strands the nice thing is the leds usually have a sticker on the backside of it so i'll peel it off and i'll start wrapping things off once everything's perfect we'll start getting the epoxy ready [Music] all right we'll have to cut it right over here without damaging all the leaves [Music] let's just do a quick test run make sure all the leds work before you start putting epoxy because that'll be annoying if that's the problem [Music] we got lights baby let's do epoxy we gotta start preparing the epoxy here's the gist of it we're gonna take a lot of these scrap pieces of wood and we're gonna barricade frame this off except for the top that's what i'll be pouring from in order for the epoxy to release this piece of wood we have to cover it in a sheathing tape this is stuff they used to tape your uh exterior shell of a framed house the uh the weatherproof sheeting material to put on there so we'll cover each piece with this tape and then i'm going to put just a few brad nails to hold in place [Music] we're going to use a caulking tool so we're going to put a big chunk about down and then we're going to press it in it's going to create a nice tight seal and then everything on the outside will be able to peel off tomorrow when it dries i have caulking tools but sometimes the finger works just fine [Music] it's the next day all of our caulking is dry we're ready to start pouring the epoxy i've used a bunch of different epoxies and i'm not really a pro at it i'm just had a few projects where i tried it so this is the stuff i've used before system three their river cast for just this setup was 270 bucks noticed some kind of bit a little bit very important you spend the time mixing it i think according to this ratio it's like a full five minutes of mixing do not skip out at it time's up let's get to pouring [Music] so one of the most common questions i always get from people is what is the hardest project you ever done or where have you scro screwed up and it cost quite a bit of money to fix it and this is that project everything went wrong i will be completely honest this has been sitting for seven days because it's like a slow cast which seems like a slow drying period i had to report three different times it would seep through all the either the caulking that we used or oh the glue that we used uh and i probably even rushed the process a little bit in hindsight if you will try this my advice for to you is gonna be use the tyvek tape right use the the wood forms to you know staple it on with the brad nails but then go one step further put waterproofing silicone on the inside and then on the outside like i did here it was coming out of every orifice i was so stressed out but we got it i i've multiple pours i've used up the entire bottle how to buy more more more epoxy but we got it we learned our lesson so if you're gonna try it follow these instructions uh don't do the way i did it and i think you'll save yourself quite a bit of money and frustration on the epoxy port let's start cutting with our utility knife popping these puppies off and we'll do a whole bunch of cleaning [Music] so it's coming off pretty easily the the place you get in trouble is obviously with the epoxy uh spilled and a straight up on the wood look how clear that turned out by us sanding it it will scuffing this up and created more of an opaque look so we won't see the led lights when they're turned off uh if you find a better way how to make sure nothing spills out when it comes to epoxy and all this stuff comes off easily let me know i'll let you know but in the meantime we're going to keep trucking and uh put a lot of grunt work in here so this is about as clean as i was able to get obviously there's some of the glue still there i'm going to start hitting up with 120 grit it's coarse enough to take a bunch of it off i'm assuming i'm going to go through a bunch of sandpaper now in terms of finish i'll probably hit it with 220 put a little oil see what it looks like if it's a perfect opaque opacity if not we might go up into 300 but we'll just see how it goes all right boys and girls we sanded everything down to 220 grit it looks fantastic nice and clean i love this raw color i'm gonna put these brackets back in place for this channel via the pocket hole screws now before we attach the top to the bottom we have to accommodate for wood movement meaning i can't just willy-nilly put screws in there i have a little bit of uh scrap left over two inch wide material it's an eighth inch thick i'm gonna cut it with a reciprocating saw put a couple holes and then we'll secure the top via that method it's important to note whenever you're drilling through metal do not go full blast on your drill it'll sometimes yes it'll cut quickly for a cut or two but then the tips will get so hot you'll actually see color changing on them and at that point you're just going to be dulling it the last things we have to do is recess these puppies in because if we don't then the top lays on top here and get away with it but i just you can make it look prettier so i'm going to use my little palm router with a little cutout bit trace it out and just cut it out you can chisel it out whatever you want to do my friend [Music] so we're talking about wood movement and securing this in a way that is a wobble also allows for this to move you know slightly of whatever it has to happen these are one inch screws and then this is where the big moneymaker is a washer by putting this in in that combination it'll hold the top to the legs while wobbling and if this really wants to go again very small increments this will give it a little bit of a wiggle room to be able to accommodate it and prevent it from corkscrewing it [Music] folks the table's done well at least the first part of it clear coat time to seal this puppy off i'm using this water-based polyacrylic this is a clear satin hvlp sprayer high volume low pressure gonna give it a nice couple of coats to make sure it'll absorb everything that you know it's not leaving stains and then we'll go and start working on the tower after that [Music] solid in all right you might be wondering what is this that we're doing here well i want to make this desk extra cool uh if you ever seen like light box trusses in a stage production like this well i want to make that something similar to that i want to build that over to the top where the monitor will be and suspend like speakers for the gaming console uh to point down on you maybe a light bar if you're gonna be streaming or something like that this is cool because i didn't know it but before you have to buy plumbing steel that has threads on it and put all these connections but now you can just get the stuff that has no threads you slip it in and there's an allen key that tightens it in place so you can make any configuration you want is basically putting legos together here is the trusses light box cage that we're making everything that you see that's black right there that's usually some kind of transition fitting whether it's a 90 degree elbow maybe it's a t the diameter or the distance or the width of this desk is exactly the the size of our table top which makes it a lot easier the center uh monitor part will be 34 inches wide we're going to build these up and then they'll give us enough room for the big monitor and all that stuff so in the meantime i'm going to use a chop saw start cutting up all these metal pipes if you don't have one you could use a reciprocating saw with a reciprocating metal blade totally doable this elbow here is going to be for the speaker to be mounted on and what's nice is even though they cut this hole there's a plug that you can put into it again i've never knew these kits existed i think it has to be like a recent thing [Music] all right finishing touches before this aluminum style uh lighting trusses are done is i got these platforms that will match the top uh these are gonna be for the speakers i got these really cool retro gaming speakers the aluminum lighting trusses look incredible this looks like a stage production kind of thing it's so cool all right accessory time we got these sweet speakers i found on amazon and what's a streaming gaming setup without a proper lighting condition to for the cameras this is incredible already i cannot believe this is what we come up with the trick right now is to run all these wires through the tubing here and connecting all the leds so that everything's working in a module down below i'm gonna figure out all the design attachments and go from there [Music] i drilled holes in the side of this tower so i'm going to run wire from left to right speaker through this top channel hey thanks so much for sticking around watching yet another one of my videos it means the world to me and if you're bringing a channel and you like videos like this or any other kind of home improvement project or builds make sure you hit that subscribe button tap the notification bell that will be alerted every time a video comes out connect with my social media all the links will be description below as well as my patreon and the merch section all help support the channel fun fact about the patreon account we have extended versions of these videos hour-long directors uncut versions there's a lot of information that did not make it into just the 18-minute video hopefully that will serve you guys a lot of help on these builds a huge thank you to hunting class for sponsoring this video make sure you use a link in the description download the app and use my gift code hunt with alex to redeem your offer and i can't wait to see you on the next build tune out this week we'll see you guys on the next one see ya bye oh where's this coming out of it it's right there there it is all right we are dripping we are dripping it's coming just out of this little section here uh it is coming out of the bottom crap okay we're gonna waste a bunch of epoxy right now