Chris Chase's Console Computer

n October of 2005, Ella and I found ourselves in Sydney, Australia in a tiny little apartment with barely enough room to move around let alone have a monsterous entertainment center and computer desk.... so I did a little modifying and turned our TV stand into a multimedia entertainment center and internet-enabled PC workstation. We had rented a television from Rent-A-Center and I purchased a cheap Sauder TV stand from K-ma-part. The TV was a bit pathetic. An old tube televison that I could now buy for as much as I was renting it per month. It was a quaint little set-up, and although I like quaint... I didn't have enough room in the apartment to be wasting that much space. I purchased a used computer tower from one of the locals (the nice thing about being a tattoo artist is that it's a very social job, you make a lot of connections and have time to talk to a lot of different people) and proceeded to rip it apart. I also purchased a second, identical, TV stand. This one was a display. When I initially went back to purchase another TV stand, they were out. One of the clerks assured me that they would have a shipment come in within a fortnight. After three weeks, there still wasn't one in and they had put a clearance sticker on the display. So I bought it. It really didn't matter if it was a little banged up, I was going to hack it for parts anyway. Still, I had to carry the sucker home in one piece. Once I got it back home, I proceeded to tear it apart. I ended up having to buy a new drill and saw so that I had something to modify the stand with. My goal was to stack the two stands... shorten the top one up a little, and place the computer inside the upper stand so we could still use the lower one for the X-Box. All of the pieces had to be lopped off and I measured it out so that I could also fit a sliding keyboard tray above the computer. Then, I had to rip apart the computer and squeeze all the components into the space in the stand. While I was installing the components, I managed to drop my screwdriver into JUST the right spot... and poof there went the motherboard. It even had a nifty little curl of smoke. Suffice to say, I had to go and purchase a new motherboard. By the time I had finished with this computer, the only things that were original were the power supply one of the disk drives, and some pieces of bracketing. Everything else was replaced. I ended up having to construct a wooden framework for the face. This gave me somewhere to anchor the power button (seen in the center of the console) and a way to anchor the card reader and disk drives. It all fit together nicely in the end, even though I had to change the original plan because of the new motherboard. I had originally designed the computer to have the motherboard facing the other direction, but when I fried it and had to buy a new one, the new motherboard was constructed differently and had to be put in backwards. This initially caused some swearing because I really didn't have enough wood to keep reconstructing the framework, but it worked out in the end. I created a face for the computer out of the wood-faced backing that usually covers the rear. This was also a point of frustration because I was VERY short on this material and there was no place to buy new. Since the stand was sold out and discontinued, I wouldn't be able to match the wood even if I tried buying another whole stand. I messed up one front piece by inverting some measurements. I messed up another piece when I blew out the motherboard and had to move all the components around. I almost messed up the third piece, but luckily I was over instead of under and I could just file out some more room. I also had some early issues with the keyboard size. I had originally measured for the wired keyboard that came with the computer. When I upgraded to a Logitech wireless keyboard, I hadn't accoounted that the keyboard might be larger. So if you look closely, the top section of TV stand is spaced just slightly further apart than the lower portion. The end result gave me a larger PC case area and JUST enough room for the keyboard. Due to the wider keyboard tray, the cover for the PC case was an UNCUT shelf from the TV stand. Literally, I could not have made this any wider. It was a really nice design in the end. In order to get at the guts of the computer, you take off the desktop, which pops straight up, it is secured with straight and unglued dowels, and remove the keyboard tray, and then the lid of the case comes off, again, with unglued dowels. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually VERY simple. The worst part is taking the monitor (and all the collected doodads) off the desktop. Finally, I bought a printer/scanner and scanned in the woodgrain of the TV stand from a piece of scrap. I then printed out some custom stickers to place over the disk drives so that they blended in. It wasn't an exact fit due to some bevels and that one drive was squared off while the other one was rounded... and one was black and one was white... but who am I to complain. In the end it looked fantastic. The drives pop right out of the wood and the power button was finished off with a large washer glued to the front. The bottom of the entire stand houses the printer/scanner. So, from bottom to top: Printer scanner X-Box Controllers and peripherals X-box Printer paper PC case Storage for notes Keyboard tray Desktop On the desktop you can see that I purchased a flatscreen LCD monitor, a digital television box (far left) a television antennae, computer speakers, a webcam (for keeping in contact with the states) and the wireless mouse. The whole setup was very neat and tidy, at least once I vacuumed up the sawdust. The final touch was a new computer chair, which also became my TV watchin' chair. By the end I had purchased a large screen LCD to fit the space (from wall to doorframe) and a new set of computer speakers with a sub that I put in the rear of the room so we had surround sound. It became our all-in-one entertainment center. The X-box played through the digital television box, and the television played through the graphics card via the digital box. We never ended up getting cable, we figured, what's the point, it would just enable us to watch American television, and we were more interested in emersing ourselves in the Australian culture... even if that meant watching "Neighbors."