Here's what you need, for sure. This sounds like a lot more than it is, mostly by way of discussion. You really don't need anything more than what's listed here.

• A power drill of some sort and drill bits. Corded or cordless doesn't really matter, except that corded is generally (but not always) more powerful and more expensive, and cordless is generally (but not always) more convenient. "Electric screwdrivers" are crap, don't buy them -- they have a clutch in them, but even if you circumvent that so that you can get the full power of the motor (which isn't easy!), it's still like a "Little Tikes" toddler toy ride-in car vs a midsize Toyota. Avoid. As for drill bits, literally the cheapest black metal stuff in the store will do you fine. Don't bother with anything fancier, but do get something with at least a couple dozen sizes.
  
• A multimeter. Don't get the awful ones at Walmart or hardware stores if you can avoid it. Go to an electronics place -- no, not Best Buy (ha!) or the Late Great Radio Shack. Honestly, the $15 Sparkfun Multimeter is legendary for a reason, and gets my penultimate recommendation. (I have one from back when they were still yellow!) You can kind of get away with not having a multimeter, for what it's worth, but it's really hard. You'll need a "continuity tester" (basically a flashlight-bulb-and-battery plus clip leads to complete the circuit, if whatever you're clipped to is connected through, it lights up) and some sort of voltmeter that can handle up to about 24vDC and tells you if you've got your polarity mixed up but otherwise doesn't mind (+/- ends swapped). Cheaper and easier by far to just get the multimeter, trust me.
  
• A screwdriver or bit-driver set. Best bet here is an electronics bit-driver set. The ones Amazon carries under weird brand names you've never heard of, marketed as "electronics repair screwdriver bit set" type things -- those are your best bet, especially ones with magnetic bits. (Don't go to AliExpress unless you want to be old and gray with a Gandalf beard when it finally arrives!) Mine is branded "ORIA" and is awesome. Also, protip -- the Walmart "Hyper Tough" one in neon puke green is not a magnetic-bit set... annoyingly. I can't recommend it because of that, but if you're absolutely desperate beyond all reproach, it's better than nothing.
  
• A big, long-handled Philips and slot-head screwdriver pair. Sometimes things need "persuading"... don't be afraid to apply a little leverage when you have to ;) and have what you need on hand for that. Speaking of which, expect the slot-head model to do double-duty as a miniature prybar... this is an old trick for a reason. Magnetic tips are a plus, here, too, BTW, and you should be willing to pay a little extra for them if you can.
  
• A mini hacksaw. Sometimes also called a "compact hand hacksaw" which doesn't make much sense. This is the kind where there's a utility-knife-style grip in line with a standard 10in or 12in hacksaw blade. If what you're looking at is a case of "Honey I Shrunk The Otherwise-Normal Hacksaw", pistol-grip and all, that's the wrong thing. These things are incredible, though -- you don't need a big-boy saw, Dremel, or anything like that if you have one of these, not for this project at least... unless you're doing something absolutely whackadoodle to show off, in which case you probably already have a garage half-full of fancy tools I've never heard of anyways.
  
• A utility knife. Sometimes called a box cutter knife. Put away your tactical survival how-red-is-your-neck Signature Jeff Foxworthy Edition hog-splittin' sawtooth switchblade thing, you want just a basic yellow Stanley "it's sharper than a butter knife" type here, the kind literally everyone uses to open cardboard everything. Don't pay more than you have to, even Walmart's cheapest bargain-bin model is good enough. Anything fancier just gets in the way. Protip: keep spare blades on hand. They're cheap, and if you snap one late in the evening on a rainy Sunday, they're invaluable.
  
• An X-Acto knife and blades. You only need a basic metal handle and a #11 style blade, which is the one everyone knows and recognizes instantly. Get lots -- the little box of fifteen blades with the disposal slot on one side carries a princely price tag but is well worth the cost. Competitor and off-brands are fine -- "Excel" is a good one, if you can get it. If you are absolutely destitute, at least at the moment (October 2021), Dollar Tree, in some stores, sells a little kit with a metal handle and six blades (of which one is a #11 style) for a wrinkled Washington plus sales tax. That said, Dollar Tree changes inventory almost as often as the Kardashians go through lipstick, and not all stores carry all things, so I don't guarantee that your store has it when you go looking (and please don't ask me to try!). Also -- blades are NOT sold separately, so go next door to Walmart, afterwards, and get as many spare blades as you can pay for from the craft section, though!
  
• A set of pliers. You should have a regular "pair of pliers" pair of pliers (technically, these are "water pump" or "slip joint" pliers) and at least two sizes (regular and fine/narrow) of needlenose pliers. Multiple variations on these (especially bent-nose style needlenose pliers) is great to have if you have a little cash to burn on it.
  
• Wire nips. Also called diagonal cutters, wire cutters, diagonal pliers, etc... I once knew someone who called them "parrot beaks" (ha!) but I think that was just that one very weird fellow. If you can only get one size, get really small ones -- I know this seems odd, but I speak from experience. I hardly ever use anything larger than my smallest pair and I have four sizes. I don't even know where my biggest ones are! If you can afford it, though, get a really small pair and a middling-sized pair.
  
• A nibbler tool (OPTIONAL). This is one of only two weird / specialty tools, and one of the two tools that are optional here. Having this will make your life a LOT easier, but you don't absolutely have to have it to do what you need to do -- there are other ways of doing what it does, although all of those ways are a lot clumsier and uglier. A "nibbler" is a metal-working tool, although it can be used on nearly anything up to about 1/8in (3.5mm) thickness or so, depending on how strong you are. Basically, it's a little block wtih a handle and a sort of 'tooth' mechanism. When you squeeze the handle, the tooth pulls back into the block, and if you've got it set up right against something, a little notch gets taken out of that something, as if a rabbit took a bite. Hence the name! This one is essentially identical to mine, dirt cheap but impressively durable -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002KRACO
  
• A basic soldering iron and solder. This is the other specialty tool, and the other optiional tool. Whatever you do, do not get one of those genuinely horrendous "Radio Shack" rug burner style ones that plug straight into the wall, take ten minutes to heat, and usually claim to be 30w or so... those are nasty and truly awful and you should avoid them at all costs. A cheap temperature controlled soldering station would be my recommendation... Amazon has 'em for pretty low. Dave Jones of YouTube "EEVBlog" fame got a laugh out of the 'Yihua' brand ones, some years ago, but he has stupidly high standards and they're actually pretty good. I had a similar one, rebranded by Sparkfun (and, sadly, long out of circulation) for quite some time. It was fine. If you can get a used Hakko on eBay, that'd be even better. I have a Hakko 926 that looks like it's been through a war, but it's one tough little fella and has never given me one lick of trouble.
  
  Honestly -- if you can get a 2amp-rated-output power bank dirt cheap, get one and get an 8-Watt USB soldering iron off Amazon. Not kidding. Those things rock. (Before anyone makes sarcastic remarks about their capability... I repaired a spade lug on a large home air conditioner with one of them once, as its first use. That was at least five years ago, and I still have the iron and use it occasionally. It works fine.) If you're desperate, get the iron and rig a USB socket to a cheap six-volt lantern battery -- trust me, I know what's in those irons, they won't care. Above all, however, DO NOT EVER USE A CHEAP USB SOLDERING IRON WITH A WALL WART. Neither the iron's tip nor the power supply's output is mains-isolated, and there's enough wall current at that tip as a result to make an LED glow!
  
  As for solder... avoid the newfangled "lead free" stuff. The fumes you see when people solder is what's called rosin flux, which basically is overcooked pine sap. There is absolutely no metal content there, it's all hype and confusion by people who mean well but have no idea whatsoever what they're actually talking about. 60/40 tin/lead is old as the hills and works fine. I tried lead-free solder once... it stuck to itself and the iron and nothing else. Gave me fits. It now resides where it belongs -- in my garbage can! The stuff I routinely buy now is labeled "American Solder" by Tejani Metal Industries. The common old formula -- 60% tin, 40% lead -- rosin-core electronics solder, 0.8mm / 0.031in dia stuff, 100-gram spools. I buy three spools at a time so I only have to buy it once a year, but I do a LOT of tinkering. One spool is flagrant overkill for this project, TBH, but it's what I'd recommend.
  
  YouTube has tons and tons and tons of tutorials on how to solder. I'll be honest, don't ask me, my technique is awful and I've so far been too lazy to establish better habits, even though I know I should. It's actually easy to do, even badly -- and even badly done, it works fine, which is why I've not been motivated enough to fix my cringeworthy techniques!
  
• If you absolutely won't do soldering for any reason whatsoever under the sun. Get some really tiny wire nuts. Orange ones and ones that are even smaller -- they're color coded. Before you start howling at me about wire nuts in your computer, the wires in your walls are held together with wire nuts and there's a whole lot more power going through that stuff than will ever see the inside of a computer box -- and, after all, you'll only need this for power wires! Pick your poison.
  
• One thing you won't need: anti-static gear. I know people are going to want to yell and scream and shout at me for this. You know what? You're all full of crap. I'm not even going to give you a chance. Bugger off, the lot of you, you're wrong. It's hype and old wives' tales and hearsay and the sort of Polly-Want-A-Cracker rumor mill material that has a longer paper trail than Simone's famous line in "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" about how Ferris is supposedly out sick!
  
  My local tech shop, the guy who owns it is best buds with me. He does his repair work on a pretty little towel -- not a bath towel, the kind that's like a knotted rug. Truth is, we both acknowledge, openly, that he even has that rug for insurance reasons only  -- you'd be hard-pressed to get a bigger load of bull-whotsit if you went to a cattle farm. Mind you, he routinely works on everything from $250 Walmart specials sold last month to XP era Dells to everything every major computer company (and most of the minor ones that do their business here) have sold in the years between those two extremes. He's seen some weird stuff, trust me...
  
  Personally, I've worked on everything from 115x-Socket desktops with gaming motherboards to Commodore machines and Compaq Portables barely a year or two younger than I am (and I was born in the mid-Eighties!). I have an electronics background that's just as fleshed-out as my experience with computers, because the two developed simultaneously -- and I've been tinkering and computing since the early 1990s. I've never needed antistatic protection for anything I've worked on, and neither I nor my pal have ever wrecked anything with static. TBH I don't think I could if I tried, and I'm surprisingly good at wrecking things when I tinker, honestly.
  
  The technical: The hype around anti-static measures refers specifically to the very earliest generation of CMOS-process chips (like the first 4000-series glue logic chips, 27Cxx ROM chips, and early static/dynamic RAM chips with a '-C' appended to their part numbers), which were extremely static-fragile, because in the 1970s, ways of protecting chips' internals from getting zapped by static was poorly understood. However, by even the early 1980s, that problem had essentially been solved.
  
  The bottom line: if it's any computer or electronics anything that's relevant to what we're doing here, you do not need antistatic stuffs. Period, full stop, we're done here.
  
  A preemptive warning. Comments discussing matters regarding antistatic protection will be reported, requesting removal. This is not a place where debate on such a matter is appropriate, and I think I've put forth enough evidence of my expertise and experience in this regard to establish that I know what I'm talking about. There are plenty of other places for such discussion -- use them.

The next Log will explain roughly what a cyberdeck is and my approach (and formula) to building them.