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Mahogany Desk Pc build Art Deco inspired "dreambuild"

Koverhar
Level 7
Greetings,

This build has been in the works for the past 3 years and is within months of finishing. It's been a lot of work and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

The idea was to make your workspace feel like sitting at a grand piano. I love old speedboats and the design of the first half of the 20th century in general. The design is heavily influenced from that era. Everything in this build is pretty much built from scratch. I've been blessed with having a building partner along the way who's helped me throughout the build, his name is Mikael, mine is Wilhelm.

Special shoutouts to Daniel at Singularity Computers for his effort in making the reservoir according to my design and to ICEMODZ for giving a good deal on the cables.

Here's a photo where it is at currently, below you will find the build from the very start and I hope enjoy this 🙂

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PC parts:

Motherboard: MSI BigBang Xpower 2, x 79 lga 2011¨
CPU: Intel i7-3930k @ 4.6Ghz
RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator 1866Mhz
PSU: Corsair ax1500i
GPU(s): 2xGTX 980s overclocked to whatever I can reach:)
HDD/SSD: 2xWD red 6tb+3xV-Samsung 500gb. 2 in raid and 1 as bootdrive

Watercooling:

Radiators: 2xmonstah 560mm,1xalphacool 360mm
Pumps: Plexitop EKWB d5x2
Piping: Iodized copper
Reservoir: Custom Singularity Dual loop acrylic reservoir.
Fans: Various Noiseblocker fans 25 in total.

In built audio:

ODAC 2 from mayflower for my Sennheiser hd 650's

PC parts:

Motherboard: MSI BigBang Xpower 2, x 79 lga 2011¨
CPU: Intel i7-3930k @ 4.6Ghz
RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator 1866Mhz
PSU: Corsair ax1500i
GPU(s): 2xGTX 980s overclocked to whatever I can reach:)
HDD/SSD: 2xWD red 6tb+3xV-Samsung 500gb. 2 in raid and 1 as bootdrive

Watercooling:

Radiators: 2xmonstah 560mm,1xalphacool 360mm
Pumps: Plexitop EKWB d5x2
Piping: Iodized copper
Reservoir: Custom Singularity Dual loop acrylic reservoir.
Fans: Various Noiseblocker fans 25 in total.

Lets start off then.

Solid drawing

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Let's weld. Starting off with the basic shape. Table will be roughly 1800x780mm

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Radiator bay:

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Parts started to come in

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After a few more hours I have room for my legs and some placement for the fans

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Gonna want some monitoring

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The wood was ordered like this. Huge chunks of birch. The will be shaped to be the outer panels of the chassi. It's a really dense wood and it's been dried for years properly before being used.
Quite heavy actually. These 3 parts weigh about 50kgs or about 110 pounds

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After using different bits and sanding roughly down ending at about 320 grit paper I managed to shape them to the shape I desired.

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Playing around a bit with some of the parts. That's an ST8 Motherboard tray from a caselabs pc

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So I contacted Singularity Computers and he luckily agreed to make my design of a dual loop reservoir come to life. The plan was something like this
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Then I needed some legs. Used 60mm hollow steel pipe and some 40x40mm steel for the upper bars.

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And the mounting for the screenstand was lathed by some shaft steel

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23 REPLIES 23

Koverhar
Level 7
Got ze legs in place

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And this will be the placement for the screenstand. Mirroring the design of the legs

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A very professional way of planning:)

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Wouldn't be a proper desk build unless we had support for 3 screens

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We used some 12mm thick steel for this. It's incredibly overkill but it can handle whatever I decide to mount on it

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Trying to make the angles "talk to each other" if that makes sense:)

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Testmounting some stuff

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Had to play around with the parts to see if they fitted properly. They did:)

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Big radiators but they will be completely hidden:)

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Even though it's quite a tight fit

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All the major watercooling parts testfitted

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Playing around with the fan controller

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Got my reservoir back and Singularity Computers also made a video of it. Very very happy with result. It's just fantastic craftsmanship.

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He made a video of it as well



And on to the interior wood. Now this is actually a pretty long process. But to roughly summarize it:
I had lying around some teak and mahogany plywood and it had been drying up since the mid 1990s so it was just too good to not use for this. I'm just in love with this stuff

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Very tedious process of fitting each panel in individually as well as matching the lines perfectly

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After several hours all the panels fit.

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Had to rework the starboard side a bit

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Got a new cover plasmacut from the local workshop

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Looking decent

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Time to make the holes for the fans and PSU

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In order to cut this out a special tool had to be made.

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Lathed out room for the fans as well. Despite the desk being really big there's not any extra room to work with

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Happy with the result

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The starboard side

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Fused 3 panels on each side together to get them in and out of the table

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Custom PSU mount that also fits 3 ssd's and 2 hdd's

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Slowly but surely getting progress

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Got some parts back from paint:)

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Time to mount the sidepanels. Had to make incredibly sturdy mounting for this since they weigh so much

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From the side

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The front:)

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Started with the varnish. Ended up redoing all this but you'll see soon enough:)

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Couldn't cut these at home due to the thickness so went to the local woodshop. They were rather confused when I said it's a pc:)


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Angles worked out fine

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Starting to look better

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Wanted to get a feel for how it will be to work at this thing

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DX racer for scale

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Got the hardened glass that I ordered

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Rounded corners same radius as the fans:)

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After some work with a CNC I got the sidepanels fixed to have openings for the fans and the fancontroller

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Liking the look now

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Was a bit worried before I testmounted this whether or not it would line up properly with the interior. Gladly it did

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This is not the actual fancovers but wanted to get a feel for how it will look before I drew them up in CAD for the waterjet

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From the inside

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The nightmare of the top part of the wood:) To get this to fit properly we had to get all the angles right and shave off half a millimeter at a time until it fit properly. This was a lot harder than I expected but it was worth it

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It fits!:)

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And now to the gluing. Using Marine glue here. Takes a long time to harden but it's incredibly strong. Also tapping her up so it doesn't move

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Gotta protect the painting

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Probably not the best method but it works:)

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After a bit of manhandling it it's finally glued and won't be touched for 2 weeks

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Just had to test with the glass on.

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The 2 weeks had passed and I put it back on the legs.

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Didn't mention it before but the outer shell is actually removable and will remain so if a fan breaks or something like that

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All alone in the corner:)

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Reinforced the on some points just to make sure

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Time to get those holes needed done

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1 Radiator ventiolation hole

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and 2 holes + the mountstand hole

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Getting closer

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That's not how the mountstand will sit. You'll see later

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And the glass hole:)

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Yeah, lets do key ignition. No real reason except it would be really cool:)

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Sits pretty well at it's place

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Trying to get some harmony with the design. Maybe you think that's jibberish but there's some thought put into this:)

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The glass is finally inside

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My friend testsitting it

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And the last cavity needed is for the USB, 6.3 mm audio and volume controls etc. Will be using a homemade potentiometer solution here and hiding the DAC/AMP inside the table

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Had to continue filling up the glue until there was enough to go sanding

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First round of sanding down to 320 grit paper. Will go down to about 2000 eventually

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Wasn't completely happy with the interior panels so I actually redid all of them with 8 layers of 2 component diamond mahogany varnish. It's resistant to heat and water so it will have a long life inside

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Looks a lot better now

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Had to make a solution for getting all of the pieces together so had some long screws that goes through the interior panel and the steel frame and end in the outer panel. These can't be seen unless you're actively looking for them

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Mounting solution for the back panel

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Back panel fitted

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Ordered some more watercooling parts from Highflow

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This is what I'll use for audio. The sennheiser hd 650s and and ODAC amp/dac solution from Mayflower Electronics

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Had to make custom hinges or we would never get the glass out easily. Will also install electric motors for this so you don't have to do anything else than push a button

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Might as well mention this is just prototyping. The actual hinges will be made out of 6mm steel

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Instagram filters:) jk

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Lathing out a volume knob

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Playing around with the stains

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My ODAC came home. I just love the sound of this thing. Paired up with my sennheiser hd 650s listening to Pink Floyd has never been this good:) What a beast this little thing is. Lathed a new volume button though since I prefer the feel of metal:)

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Got my CAD drawings watercut. Well they were supposed to be watercut but the machine was broken at the place so they plastmacut it. Also got my custom hinges watercut but you'll see those pictures later.

Gonna be a riddiculus amount of filing and sanding before I can send these to get chromed but we'll get there, fingers crossed.

Sry for the pictures but I cant place it inside yet but at least you get a feel for what I'm trying to achieve here

These are the sides (port-side specifically)

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Big radiator grills. 566 mm's across

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Actually lathed them in so you have a skirt of wood covering the first 4 mm's

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Here's the stuff from Icemodz huge shoutout once again! Thank you for believing in this project

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It's friday friday

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Time to continue then..

So finally getting some components in. They will go out and in quite a bit before it's all said and done but still feelss like a great milestone

Here's some overview shots.

Chassi only

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Body on

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Made some custom steel mounting pieces for the pumps. They've been powdercoated after that

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The motherboard tray is also in it's natural habitat now. We made a cable hiding tool behind the motherboard tray and had a panel lasercut to make it look nice. The 2 holes are for some temp-monitoring