Tour of my messy workbench and home office

Overview

Is your home office or workbench a huge mess too? I can’t seem to keep mine clean for more than a couple of days! Join me for a candid tour of my messy workbench area filled with ongoing projects: Commodore 64s needing color fixes, stacks of IBM monochrome monitors, Dell Precision PCs for eBay, laptops awaiting repair, and boxes of junkyard finds. This is the reality of juggling multiple retro computer projects.

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction: My perpetually messy workbench
• 1:00 Commodore 64 with color issue project
• 2:00 IBM monochrome monitors and eBay inventory
• 3:30 Memory organization system using plastic trays
• 4:00 Cable management and adapter storage
• 5:00 Laptops and computers with issues, awaiting repair
• 6:30 Boxes of parts and junkyard finds
• 7:00 Rolling cart for mobile workbench
• 8:00 Closet full of restoration projects
• 9:00 Final thoughts and future plans for dedicated studio

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there, YouTube. I wanted to kind of do this quick video—another behind-the-scenes look at my life, or at least my project life. And I wanted to ask you: is your home office or workbench area a mess too? Because I can’t seem to keep this clean for more than a couple days. Every single time, I find myself with other projects and things like that.

So I’m gonna give you a little tour here. I start off with my Commodore 64 here. I bought this cheap from a guy here with a bunch of games and stuff. It works, but it’s still a project because it doesn’t show any color. So I heard that—I read online that this is like a common issue. If you know a quick fix for this or something, let me know. But I’m going to be doing a video on how I’m gonna fix that color issue. I think it’s probably with the RF modulator or something. So maybe I’ll do a hack on it so that it shoots out component.

These are two of my several IBM monochrome monitors. Kind of like how they look up there, even though I haven’t used them. I have the IBM somewhere else. These are in line to be sold on eBay.

I have a bunch of these Windows 10 PCs. They are, I think they’re i5s or i3s. They’re Dell Precision 1700s. This is like a little thin client that is hiding in there.

I got a bunch of memory cases here. I got these cases off of eBay, and it’s great to store your memory modules in the actual cases that they would come in from the factory. So you can get these—I’ll put a link in the description for these guys. If you have a lot of memory like I do, it’s good to have them stored like this so that you can easily use them for your builds.

I like to put my cables like this, hanging over, and that way I can quickly glance and get the cables I need. I also use old shipping boxes to store things like adapters. Like this is my DVI adapters and USB to PS/2. These are things that I actively use when I prepare computers for sale on eBay.

Here is a little bit of a mess. I had a bunch of computers stacked here, but I’ve sold them, and now this is kind of accumulating into a big mess. These are computers that have issues, and these need to be prepared. Down here I have some boxes of AC adapters—these are 19 volts and 12 volts. Again, these are like inventory for things that I sell on eBay. I’ll link in the description below my eBay store so you can take a look at the things I sell. It’s a lot of thin clients and other things that have been repurposed.

Down there, those boxes have laptops. They’re laptops that have missing components or missing parts. I got them really cheap from an eBay seller a while back, and I haven’t even opened the boxes. So those I plan to, you know, flip them, set them up, and flip them.

These are some MacBooks, and these are some other laptops that I’m in the pipeline to be fixed. I got more stuff here. So you can see here, this is another box full of laptops. So I got three. I got some old IBM stuff—software and reference library for my IBM 5150s. I have several of those.

This is a Dell that is on the pipeline to be sold on eBay. I’m gonna make it into a Windows XP/Windows 98 dual boot with a sliding hard drive and a Sound Blaster built in. So I’ll create a video for that one so you can take a look.

I like using my old Packard Bell keyboard when I need to use a PS/2, so that’s what that’s doing there. And these little carts—this is a little cart that I got from Ross, and these are great. Like when I want to do like a mobile workbench somewhere, I can move it around. It has wheels, and I have a bunch of different stuff in there—tools and things that I can take with me.

So yeah, I also have this closet, which is not very well laid out, honestly. I could probably do better and squeeze more things in there. But for now, I have a bunch of laptops that I’m currently working on restoring. This is like a Dell Precision, like kind of gaming professional laptop, an IBM ThinkPad. Something else—I think that one’s broken, but it works whenever it wants to, which is effectively broken.

I got some cool old DOS games here. Gunship 2000 is one that I loved as a kid, and I recently bought it with a set of three—ATF, Flight Simulator, and Gunship. And maybe I’ll show that in a video how that works because I really love those games.

Again, more junk, more stuff. What else can I show you?

Yeah, so I mean, I just wanted to like show you that to get—sometimes you have to keep things a little bit messy because you never know what you’re gonna need. Like to set up one computer, I have USB adapters, USB drives with images. I have video adapters of different types. For example, I have a DVI to VGA, I have a DisplayPort to VGA. These are parts that come out of computers, and I do eventually organize everything. Like I showed you with the memory, I create—I organize them and store them. But while I’m in the process of selling a bunch of the inventory that I have, some weeks are busier, so I focus on shipping, and then I reassess.

But as you can see here, I’m currently working on a Windows XP setup. I’ve sold about 30 of these. And yeah, over here I just have my regular office space. This is for my full-time job and my personal computer. And then I have my cameras for taking product photography.

Plus I have this—this is actually pretty useful. It’s a TV. It’s an old TV. I bought it from a thrift store, and these are very useful because they have many different inputs. It’s one of those TVs with a DVD player built in. As you can see back here, you got a bunch of inputs that you can use—like component, composite, VGA. These are useful when you’re trying to test out like old VCRs. This isn’t a VCR that I’m currently working with because you can digitize your videos over to a DVD.

Yeah, so let me know in the comments below if your workbench is as messy as this. And trust me, this is—sometimes I get this immaculate, and then it just doesn’t last long. It just doesn’t, because once you start with a new project, you end up needing that, and you end up needing something else. It’s just—it’s always the same story.

I hope that one day I can have a dedicated filming studio and a work area so that I can at least keep the studio clean and create videos that don’t have all this stuff just laying around.

So yeah, let me know in the comments what you think. If you like this kind of stuff, subscribe, check out my other videos. My other videos go into detail into a lot of the teardowns for these computers and some other cool projects that I’m working on—like that one down there. That’s an old vintage laptop with a 386 processor that has a cracked screen, and this box has the IPS screen that I ordered to put in there. So it’s going to be literally the first 386 with an IPS screen.

So if you subscribe and hit the little bell, you’ll be notified when I set that up. That’s going to be one of my next projects with a full-blown video on how I’m gonna like cram a modern LCD into a vintage laptop.

Cool! So yeah, I’ll let you go now, and enjoy the rest of your day. Bye-bye!