I had gotten a really sturdy really big coffee table from a yardsale for $10 years ago, and have been using it as my computer desk and also workbench for years. I got really sick of having power strips and wires laying all over it. I used to be a greenhorn electrician like 10 years ago, so I know quite a bit about electric wiring, so when I got some cash on hand I didn't need for expenses, I got supplies.



As you can see, I got quite a bit. The white extension cable is just for it's flat plug and 14 gauge wire, the blue extension cord is just for its 14 gauge stranded wire. I already had most of the tools, but needed a pocketknife again (I grew up in rural illinois where you use your pocketknife for everything) so I got that too.

I decided to picture the visible progress instead of the whole process, so big amounts of steps are missed and then I go into lots of detail with pics, sorry for inconsistencies.



Here you see a good bit of the roughwork done. the outlet on the front left has a push-button breaker from a power strip inside it and an outlet, but that will eventually have instead an LED display ammeter and surge supression circuitry inside it.

The power strips, I removed the original switch-breaker, drilled a hole in the underside, routed cable through that, and then soldered and wire-nut covered the joints along with covering certain spots with hotglue to make it more electrically safe. The holes you see are from me drilling access for mounting them with drywall screws through the front.

The cabling you will see in a later picture, it is under the table. It is all 14 gauge stranded wire with ground.





Here you can see I mounted the wires with hotglue to keep them from moving, and also solder tinned the ends of the wires to make work go easier and for better connections.



Looks good! at least to me. ^.^





This one was the nightmare one. The two power strips, and the wire coming in from the first two outlets and out to the last one... four sets of wires to organize, tin, and hook up. I cheated (against NEC building code wiring) and used both the screw mounts and the push-in mounts on the outlet, but this isn't building wiring, it's on a piece of furniture, so I'm not breaking any codes.



The last outlet was easy, so here's right after I got done.



And this is the front view.



This is the front outlet with the power in cable. I will eventually replace this outlet with an LED display ammeter and some surge protection circuitry, to go with the 15 amp breaker you can see in the right bottom of the box.



had to treat myself to a job well done! xD



As promised, the wiring picture from underneath. I think I did well. I eventually want to replace the particle board center with something more hefty, it's bowing some.



Hooking my computer equipment back up.



Aaaaand done. I should get a picture of the back with everything plugged in, but I was far too tired after moving my stuff back to do so.

I eventually want to make a set of orange lighted pushbutton on-off switches to control (with relays) each of the duplex outlets individually, and leave the power strips running always, along with putting another hard wired powerstrip on the front right of the desk/workbench, along with the afore mentioned ammeter.

Anyone got any questions or (please keep it nice and gentle) critiques or comments?

Looks pretty damn good, I would do more modding like that but my folks still own most of the furniture. Good thing I have a tower for that. XD

SS

I think that is awesome. Your like me I also have 3 different computers. What do you do with each one.

um... I have four...or more.

Tifa
This is my workstation / gaming PC. I do all my heavy duty work on it.

also has a 750gb seagate hdd, gigabyte amd HD6850 1GB video, and intel gigabit card.
The big monitor in front of the keyboard is that one. 1080p res. The orange trim case is Tifa's.

TashaPC
This is the one on the right side, the tall one, by my printer and amp.
This is my combination server and chat machine, the monitor just above my main one, little 15 inch widescreen LCD.
am2 dual core 2.2ghz, gigabyte nvidia 570 chipset motherboard, two 2GB kingston DDR2 800 sticks, two 1TB HDD for file serving, 80GB sata HDD for OS.
I run minecraft, buildcraft, and terraria servers off of this machine, as well as trillian, xchat2 (silverex build), skype, and apache for various little things (not my site linked in my sig). It has an amd HD4350 vidcard, very low power. Also has an intel gigabit card.
This system runs 24/7/365, even when I am cleaning the dust out of her.

Emerald
This one is behind the big monitor.
Wolfdale 2.5GHz cpu at 3.33GHz, default voltage. 2x1GB DDR2 800 ram. gigabyte G45 based motherboard. intel gigabit card. pcie x1 avermedia M780 dual tuner card. amd HD5450 low power passive video card. 80GB seagate sata hdd. the monitor on the right of the desk is emerald's.
I use this one entirely for home theatre PC duties. I run MediaPortal on emerald, and use a network share from TashaPC for the media files. This PC can transcode video in realtime, while playing 1080p video through the rather advanced but low wattage video card. The only fan in this system is the one on the CPU and that one is off until the cpu takes up transcoding duties. The whole system takes under 100w of power at full load, and around 20 watts at idle.

(not pictured)
Jatom
small form factor atom n330 pc in custom case for small form factor file serving duties... offline for now until I get an intel gigabit card for it.

unnamed PCs
P3 1GHz coppermine with voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB with 512MB PC133 for early windows gaming
dual P3 tualatin 1.4GHz with 3GB PC133 ram, compaq DL360 G2, 1U server
Pentium 200mhz MMX I am piecing together for SLI v2/banshee DOS gaming
socket 939 dual core 2GHz nforce 4 with 1.5GB ram and nvidia 7900GS 256MB, my first dual core computer ever!
pentium 2 300MHz with 768MB ram and 8MB agp vidcard, I use this for testing pci cards and other old stuff.
Dell pentium 4 prescott 2.8GHz GX280. This is what I use to test things that might ruin parts - I don't care if this dies.

Nice work with the table, but I thought I'd chime in and mention we have the same tower haha. It was a pain to get the board in, none of the screw holes were properly drilled. Half of them still had shards of metal causing the screws to cross thread. Hope you had better luck!

mine was really perfect and easy to put together, I dunno why yours was messed up - prolly different production run or something. they are inexpensive cases for what you get.