I’ve been very busy at work, but I long ago finished the first drawer cabinet. I also finished a second bookshelf, but am thinking I won’t be using it in the den.
I have a final design for the under-desk rack in SketchUp. Obviously I didn’t bother drawing the router profiles. But this fits under the desks and will house my UPS, power conditioner and ethernet switches.
I have most of the parts to build this cabinet, except the casters and the porcelain. The ventilated door has a tinted scratch-resistant polycarbonate window. The hinges on the ventilated door are dual-pin (usually used for sewing machine tables). Mostly because I wanted something smallish and flush (and solid brass). I suspect this means I’ll want guide pins and sleeves, so I ordered some from McMaster-Carr. I haven’t made up my mind on latch(es); one side of me says I should just use rare earth magnets. The other side of me says I should use draw latches. A cosmetic versus robust tradeoff.
The desk design is not quite done yet, but I’m close. The top is 36″ deep and 70″ wide.
The only work I’ve done on the desk is creating the feet (for two desks). They are 1″ thick black Delrin with countersunk holes. Each leg will have 1″ long 5/16″-18 threaded inserts. 4 countersunk hex bolts through each foot thread into the inserts. I used Delrin because it’s very dense, machines like butter, and is very slippery. The downside is that it’s nearly impossible to polish, but I’ll find a solution to that later. Realistically, as long as I sand off the tooling marks, they’ll probably be fine. The goal here was to make it relatively easy to slide the desk on the porcelain tile floor.
The top of the desks have a single piece of polished porcelain. The base is oak with dowel and pocket hole screw construction, plus dowel nuts and bolts so the base can be broken down into three pieces. The top is secured to the base with threaded inserts and bolts.