New desk!

I’ve got to admit, since finishing up Sabriena and Duncan’s desk I’ve had the tiniest bit of “desk envy”, but primarily my issue has been that my desk (a $20 opp-shop special) was simultaneously too big, and not big enough. It’s an old, heavy, executive style desk… you’re supposed to look important sitting at it. So it’s only about 1.5m wide, but it’s well over 1m deep. Since I have a pair of 27” LCDs, and a monster PC case along with my Macbook, a novelty oversized mousepad, and everything else, it’s just not really big enough, but I’m also nowhere near close enough to the monitors either.

So I thought about building the same thing for myself, at a slightly smaller scale, but I balked at the price… I love my wife and kid enough to spend a couple hundred bucks on parts to build a desk, not sure I love myself enough to! I’d also like to have a sit/stand desk, but that brings with it further costs. Almost serendipitously, the local Telstra “Business Centre” (I gather it’s what used to be something of an internet cafe, but without the coffee and food?) was disposing of all their old stuff and I managed to buy an absolute monster of a desk for very cheap.

It’s a 1.8mx1.8m corner desk, very heavy-weight (but thankfully came apart, as it was in a second floor office!), and best of all, motorized! It’s not a sit-stand desk though, which is interesting… it’s got about 10” of travel, going from my usual working height of roughly 75cm, down to about 50cm… which is quite unusual. I’m not sure what the use of that would be - someone on IRC theorized that it might have been due to the weight of big CRTs, and that maybe you’d lower the desk to shift them across off a cart? I’m really not sure. But either way, I think I can modify it to work - if I raise the desk top up such that the desk at it’s lowest setting is slightly lower than my normal working height, then at full excursion it’d just about be high enough to stand at for short intervals? That’s the plan anyway, for now I’m just using it as it sits.

The motor is excruciatingly slow… again, this thing had to lift monster CRTs, but that’s actually a feature from my perspective: it means that with all that gearing it can lift my desktop case, the extra framework underneath it, and all my monitors (I plan on adding one more at some point, but again, I am so cheap it will be tough to justify spending the cash) and still have plenty of torque to spare.

Badges on the underside of it show that Telstra got it when they were still called Telecom, which dates it as early 90s at the latest but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s older than that. Either way I’m pretty happy with it so far, if I can just work out how to lay out the rest of my office…

Horsham, VIC, Australia fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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