Some of the very best letters I get come from people who have built things to give as gifts, a case in point:

Dear jake,

I really have enjoyed your site, especially the bus conversion.  I really like how you talk about using found objects and have so many pictures showing your process as you work on your projects.  My husband showed me your site last year and proceeded to drool, so when he got dual monitors for his edit system and needed a monitor stand, I knew just what to do.

. . .

Yours in Mad Science!
Amy

You sure did Amy - Awesome work! Thanks!

Much more after the cut.

Here are some pictures of the finished project, which he received for Christmas.  I got voted "coolest gift" from all his jealous friends.  GRIN

My husband is left handed and is always piling computer software CDs all over his desk, so I incorporated a drawer in the design to hold all those handy, but out of the way.  I put the drawer on the right, so it won't interfere with his mouse and graphics tablet which he has on the left.  When not in use, there is enough space for both the keyboard and mouse to fit under the stand.

We are both HP Lovecraft fans, so I incorporated the Necronomicon design in the the top inlay panel, because we all know computers are the tools of vast, alien, evil forces heh heh heh.  My husband has had his own espresso machine for years and likes to refer to himself as a caf-feind, so when I discovered an old bracelet and watch band made of gold tone coffee beans, I knew those had to be a repeated motif.  We are also Girl Genius fans, so I kind of see them as  little trilobites as well.  

I had loads of fun digging through my decade's accumulation of hardware and misc junk in the garage.  I used an old clock case, some jewelry (the gold coffee beans), and a left over slab of green serpentine marble from another project.  I got the potentiometers and vacuum tubes for free from a kind fellow off FreeCycle.  

I robbed our boxes upon boxes of old computer board parts for all the various capacitors.  (And here I thought they were just taking up space!  Those boxes were a veritable gold mine!)  The clock gears came from eBay.  The MIN-MAX dial came off a rubber toilet tank float, of all things, as did misc other parts.  It's amazing what gold paint can do!  All in all, it was a fantastic project to build and I had loads of fun with it!  Thank you for the inspiration.