Gadgetory

well guys after all the benchmarking that went on last week I thought for today's video I want to do something that's more towards to build side of things and if I'm being honest with myself there's a build project that I have neglected neglected longer than any other that is my htpc project but I have good reason for that one is of course as waiting for Eisen 3000 series to launch which has been my plan the entire time ever since I first put together and second I have a logistical problem to deal with I have this very nice piece of walnut that I purchased that has been stained and sanded I'm still got a little bit more work to do on that but I'm gonna be mounting PC hardware a motherboard and some other parts directly to that wood and I need to find a good solution to do that so today's video is all about how to mount a motherboard to wood so I'm hoping this video will come in handy for anyone who wants to do a DIY project and needs to mount electronics specifically a motherboard to a piece of wood for that purpose I have some standoffs and some other hardware here that I have sort of been accumulating let's take a quick look at that so first off here I have a test piece of wood this is just some plywood it's also birch plywood actually some scrap wood leftover from the project I did where I built to stand for Riptide so I'm going to be doing some testing on one side of this and then I actually hopefully get the motherboard mounted to this later on in the video I have some scrap pieces here to put under that since I'm just gonna be drilling right here and I don't want to drill into my table that I have I have a few kits of gear here and these I'll put links to in the description in case you're interested this is just a set of motherboard standoffs these all have m3 threading and they are of various heights so you have like standoff nuts here you have more typical style m3 nuts I have some longer standoffs these are probably going to be the ones that I attempt to use then I have some screws which will hopefully not the motherboard to the standoffs once the standoffs are match it to the wood I have a few methods I've researched to do that properly but one that I'm going to be attempting is to not use any adhesive or glue or anything like that so these are called tap bits it's a drill bit on one side but then it goes into threading right there so I might be able to use this to drill an m3 threaded hole into the wood and then just take the stand off and thread it into that hole so that'd probably be the simplest solution but I'm not a hundred percent confident in it just because I'm not sure how well these m3 threaded standoffs are going to grip the wood after I use that bit on it there are other options you could for example drill all the way through the wood and put a nut on the back but the walnut I'm working with this very thick so I'm probably not going to be able to do that so my second option is going to be to mount something into the wood that they stand off can then drill into I could possibly use these nuts just to hammer something down into it I could drill holes and then use epoxy so I do have some epoxy here some gorilla epoxy and then I can maybe glue them into the holes to make them set a lot more and make it more sturdy since I'm planning to make this a vertical mount but if I had to take a guess at what's going to be the most effective mounting method I have these other standoffs here that are actually threaded on both sides and I think I'm just going to sort of drill a small hole and then pound these into the wood to get them set possibly use some epoxy and then I can just mount the standoffs into that so with the tap method the nuts the standoffs the epoxy are not epoxy I should have maybe three to five different mounting methods I'm going to attempt then I'll pick the best one and do a setup to mount this little mini ITX motherboard to the wood the only other thing I wanted to mention here is that most motherboards are grounded through the ATX power plug but most motherboards also get additional grounding points via their mounting holes so one thing I might actually also do once I get this mounted to the wood or once I move on to the HTPC wood mounting is add an extra little grounding cable here a wire and connect that up to the power supply to provide an additional grounding point it's not a huge deal and you can run without that just by the ground in the ATX but I wanted to bring it up as a potential issue for anyone who might be trying to do something like this at home the only other thing I guess I should mention is that I'm also using a drill for this drills probably gonna be an sa here's my first attempt using the tap bit I'm just gonna try to go vertical straight up and down as much as possible that actually worked really well hey that's the tab bit version and wow that did a lot better than I thought I thought the wood was gonna get all tore up and it wasn't gonna hold very well man do I even need to do the other versions yes I will I'll still still do the next recommendation I read online was to take a nut that you already know has a threading for your stand off and basically set it into the wood either by hammering it in or setting it in with epoxy so I'm gonna try to drill a hole big enough that the net will sit into and then we'll see whether we think epoxy is worth attempting that's probably too big can at least get the idea if the nuts were set down in the wood and then that would drill into the nuts like so option 3 here is going to be to sink this standoff into the wood so for that I'm just using a drill bit that is slightly smaller than the standoff itself that's eleven sixty fourths of an inch for those of you who are measuring in freedom units and I'm gonna see how sturdy that is and then we'll see if we want to try epoxy along with either of these methods Wow that might be a winner right there so that was actually pretty quick and both the tap bit and the inset standoff method have proven very effective at least in this initial go at it they seemed very sturdy they're staying in there I'm leaning towards the inset standoff method myself but I wanted to give the nuts method a bit more of a better shot and we've got this epoxy here anyway so I'm gonna mix up some epoxy put that down into the hole so that it can hold the nuts in place and then we can mount the standoff to it just to see how that goes in the meantime I think I'm gonna go with one of the other ones just to get the motherboard mounting going but for this we have a little mixing tray for our epoxy and a little applicator into the hole that's either I screw it in now and then the whole thing sealed in there or I try to screw it in later and it probably doesn't screw in because there's epoxy in the way so let's just screw it in then so I've just mounted this motherboard I used the tap bits one thing to keep in mind for the tap bit is I was trying to do it as vertical as possible you want to go directly in and back it out as well when you get down to the depth he wants definitely switch to reverse and slowly reverse out of the hole that you have just made other than that just keeping things slow and steady I think is the key because you really don't want the threading that you were creating in the piece of wood to get messed up in any way using that method though I have now mounted this motherboard right here and I would say this is this is very sturdy look at that that's that's pretty sturdy there so to assess my three methods the tap bit method I think is very effective at least if you have reasonably hard wood that you're screwing into all you need is the tap bits and then your stand off and you're pretty much good to go I could see that potentially not working out long-term or if the wood was in an area where it might get moist or anything like that or if you had a lot of weight attached to it then you might be a little bit less confident in that method what I think I'm gonna do is the inset standoff method so I have the standoffs that just have holes on both ends drill a smaller hole and set that directly into the wood by hammering into place the hex shape of the standoffs themselves helps to keep it wedged into the hole and I think this is just my my sturdiest method and it didn't use any epoxy or adhesives or anything like that and it gives you the benefit of being able to just unscrew the stand off if you really new need to and then you can drop it and lose it forever the method with the nuts works but I was definitely hit a dilemma where to get the nuts in there and set in place I had to use a standoff screwed in to hold it and then I wanted to unscrew the stand-up but then I was really concerned that the epoxy was going to keep me from being able to screw the standoff back in so the standoff is still in there yes this is very sturdy and I think it's probably just as sturdy as the inset standoff method and it probably last you forever but it's definitely a bit messier since you have to work with epoxy and just something that is probably going to be situationally helpful for some people but I would veera way from that that if you wanted to be really really sure I think it would be to use the in sets standoff method and maybe just put the tiniest bit of epoxy down at the bottom to give it a little bit better grip and make sure it's never going to come out of that hole but that's what I'm going to be using for now I've got this motherboard mounted just with the tap bit screws and once again I would be confident with that for long-term use in just about any scenario I think so guys let me know in the comment section down below what you think of my mounting a motherboard to would methodology that I have shared today did you think it was useful you have better ideas for how it could be done more better let me know those down in the comment section down below and let me know if you have any plans to do like a DIY PC build of some sort using non traditional case or mounting methods because I am definitely gonna be applying this to the HTTP C build very soon I promise so thanks again for watching this video hit the thumbs up button on your way out if you enjoyed it and we'll see you guys next time