Remember that time when ... I made a coffee table

This is more of the geek than the green but I used this project to learn skills.

The coffee table started out as a replacement for a cheap table I got from The Warehouse for $20 new, you can imagine what kind of high quality that bought for me.  I had just started working with wood and thought this might be a good learning project for me to pick up some skills and solve the problem we had with the coffee table falling apart.   At about the same time Shay and I were both playing World of Warcraft in the evenings, she was using a laptop and I was using a PC.  Shay was having massive issues with the laptop/vista combination, it was crashing and overheating so I decided to make a coffee table with a desktop PC built into it.  There were several reasons for using a desktop rather than upgrading the laptop:

• Cheaper initial cost
• Cheaper upgrades
• More power
• Bigger screen
• Nicer controls

I started out with a bed base that we tried to sell and then tried to give away but nobody wanted it so I re purposed it.  I stripped the coverings off and pulled all the wood apart which was quite a pain as it was all glued and stapled with 40mm long staples.  Once I had all the wood for the base I started out by making it as wide as the monitor that would have to hide inside it and just a bit longer than our old table.  I needed to have room on one side for the monitor/keyboard/mouse/usb devices to hide in and the other side held the PC/Power brick/fans.

Once I had finished a base and checked it was square with the legs attached I moved to making it the right height, just slightly taller than the broken one, I left about 25mm for the table top height to go on top.

Once I had the framework done I welded up some steel for mounting the monitor on and ordered a swivel off trademe so that it could be tilted up/down/left/right.  I bolted the bracket on and trimmed the edges then painted everything.

I ordered the wood and it was far more expensive that I thought it would be, and I would have gone a different way now that I know more, but at the time my skills were really crap and I wanted something that looked good enough to sit in the middle of the lounge.  I got one sheet of 5mm ply for the sides and bottom of the table and one sheet of 25mm for the top.  I gave the dimensions I wanted it cut to the people I bought it from as I did not believe I could cut the wood straight enough at the time.

The wood turned up a couple of days later and it looked pretty good, they had put it through a sander on one side which took the bulk of the crap off it but left huge big scars in the wood from their shitty sander.  Everything fit perfectly so I drilled and screwed the edges on to the table, then moved to how I would mount the top.

I decided to make some metal brackets for the top so that it could slot in to the base and then I would just have some nuts to tighten, this worked perfectly and has made the table very solid, there are 32 screws and 4 bolts holding down that one side of the table.

Next came the hinges and my first real problem, I still haven't worked this one out which is the main reason I have not taken the table back down to the shed.  I want the hinges to be invisible of possible but every solution to that problem I have seen has either been too small or it wont fit.  I have just used a couple of brass hinges for now and they work just fine, I just think they look crappy.

So the mock-up was complete and seemed to work, I pulled it all apart again and sanded for what seemed like days then put a single coat of clear varnish over top of it.  As soon as the varnish dried a whole bunch of things I hadn't seen before popped up so I decided that I would just leave it at one coat for a few months until the varnish had gone hard enough to sand back off again without using a ton of sandpaper.

I have since assembled it and had it working for 5 months or so I guess, and its worked without a hitch.  We have been using a wireless dongle to connect it to the net but I am going to change it permanently to cable shortly as its becoming intermittent for some reason.

This is just me again explaining it.  We haven't changed much since this was taken, there are a ton of things I am going to change next time its in the shed, but that's a blog for another day.