bernieke's projects - desk

UPDATE 2022/03/24: What it looks like nowadays.

I wanted a desk which:

• fits perfectly in the space between the back and side windows in my home office
• has room for our two printers and the paper for them
• a place for my docked laptop
• lots of deep drawers of various heights for office supplies, tools, parts, ...
• has a solid (push-in, not pull-out) keyboard drawer on my height
• a comfortably high desk-surface
• built-in cable management
• and of course looks nice

Everything except for the desk-surface, -sides, drawer fronts and cable tray, was lasercut. Which allowed me to keep very close tolerances and results in a perfect fit without the need to keep extra space for manual alignment.

There is a cable management tray on the back, running the full width of the desk.

The cabinets and drawers were cut from poplar plywood, the desk surface, sides and drawer fronts were made from rubberwood. The desk surface and sides were stained mahogany, and finished with four layers of oil based high gloss polyurethane and three layers of the same in satin. The drawer fronts were finished with three layers of water based satin polyurethane.

The drawers were constructed using the torsion box principle.

And provided with templates for their contents, so I can at a glance see when my wife has not returned my stapler...

The drawer for the laptop is equipped with a temperature activated cooling fan.

The laptop drawer has a hinge system along which the wires run, to allow easy opening without damaging the wires.

I also added three boxes to:

• store some paperwork
• hold 12 reels of wire (7x0.2mm, 24x0.2mm and 1x0.8mm in four colors each)
• hold a 12/5/3V PSU, adjustable PSU, eight port internal usb hub, four port external usb hub, sd and micro sd card reader, hifi headphone amp with its PSU and a RJ45 connector hooked up to an usb FTDI for quick programming of my house automation modules

UPDATE 2021/11/06: As the original card reader cannot handle the new bigger micro sd cards, one of the usb ports started malfunctioning, the voltage display on the bench supply failed, and I now connect my headphones through a Shure MV5 microphone, the original electronics box was in need of an urgent update.

I bought a 200W ToolkitRC GaN technology bench power supply which measures only a fraction the size of the 45W one it replaces. Dropped the ATX PSU all together since the more powerful GaN supply can handle any load I require. Also left out the no longer needed headphone DAC and power supply.

The result turned out to be just the right size to put my Dymo labelwriter on top of, leaving its old spot for the new bench power supply, with some extra space to spare for a dedicated 5 port USB charger with a few short cables attached.

created: 2014/08/23
last updated: 2022/03/24