A friend and co-worker shared an interesting site with us at work today. It is about the DK-04 product from Lian-li.
Now if you cannot tell this is a computer chasis built into a desk.
More than a decade ago I lived fairly deep in the mountains and close to where my parents were living. My dad was known for making custom made furniture a lot of it completely hand crafted. That was his love and his specialty.
I was running a computer consulting business and had a lot of different types of clients including county offices, sheriff's offices, banks, sign makers, real estate offices, and many just people at their own home. I was also a Dell third party warranty repair person. I'd take road trips usually anywhere within 70 miles of my house through winding mountain roads.
One of my clients who was pretty well off was asking me to hide all of these unsightly wires and she even bought furniture supposedly designed for computers. I became aware through painful experiences how often people would just punch some holes in their design and mount a keyboard tray and call it a computer desk. Often these would include a door you could open that would reveal a cavity your could put your computer tower in. Yet they had NO ventilation. To use these I'd usually have to drill holes into the back or inside sides for my clients to insure air flow.
My dad makes custom furniture... CLICK.
I started drawing some designs. I realized looking at people sitting their knees never come even close to the back of that desk. There is more than enough room for something the width of a chasis.
I drew an idea for a vertically dropped drawer that would fall between an inner back and an outer back. This drawer would be the chasis for the computer. By doing this and designing it properly we could use physics, and things like convection to help with cooling and we could almost completely conceal any cables. If they had wireless mouse and keyboard it was almost a sure thing.
So my dad made one from my design. He made it for my son Gydion as a Christmas present. It is almost completely made of wood which may seem strange for a computer desk and it is. Yet it has actually housed several computers as we swapped motherboards and such over the years.
These are some photos I found of Gydion and the desk.
He was closer to the age of the following picture when we gave it to him.
That first design the desk actually had a raised section for that drawer that acted as a pedestal for the monitor. The real reason it was there was so we had something tall enough to stick the CD/DVD drive in. We had ideas for getting rid of that raised section completely that would have worked, but we wanted to get this prototype out.
We talked about patenting it and pursuing it, but we didn't have the money to really pursue it at the time. This was more than a decade ago.
I can tell you getting at the computer to work on it was very easy. I could do it in about 10 seconds. Move the monitor to the side and lift the drawer out of the desk.
It was quiet, the airflow was good. I was worried it might act like a sound box, but it didn't.
Now my friend shares this and I look at it and think about what might have been had my dad not passed away fighting cancer for his third time.
In many ways I believe our design was better than this desk, and that was a decade ago. We potentially could have done some very cool things.
I have several things in life that I built, and people used and then years later someone makes a lot of money doing essentially what I'd done. I'm pretty good at coming up with ideas, and in many cases even building them. I am not particularly wise when it comes to capitalizing on those ideas.
Thanks for your time... it is another glimpse into another moment in my life.
