After using his improvised Lack sitting/standing desk for about two months, Brian noticed a few flaws in his original design. First, the surface area of the standing desk was slightly too small to accommodate his keyboard, mouse, and monitor easily all at the same time. Second, the table was just a bit too high for him to use comfortably. The adjustable monitor, in its raised position, sat right where it should at eye level, but the surface of the desk was too high for the keyboard; he had to bend his arms at an uncomfortable angle to use it.
To restore these issues, he had options: boom himself up higher thru repute on a stool, or make the computing tool lower by way of shortening the legs of the Lack. Unfortunately, each of these alternatives ought to just create a brand new trouble: even as his keyboard may now be on the right peak, his monitor would be properly under eye diploma. He ought to have just set it atop the timber stand that he made for the usage of it on his ordinary, seated-degree desk, but while he considered the concept of piling the screen stand on top of the Lack table on top of the desk, it commenced to sound a chunk an excessive amount of like a activity of Jenga. So he realized that, to make a stable stand that labored at every hand degree and eye stage, he'd need to characteristic on a integrated reveal stand to the pinnacle of the Lack.
So, one wet day while he wasn't biking to artwork, he brough the Lack desk domestic with him within the car and hustled it again into his workshop, wherein he spent the following couple of hours producing diverse whirring and banging noises. His first task became to shorten the legs of the Lack. This involved a chunk extra art work than truely sawing off the ends, because the legs of the Lack are hollow besides for the very backside bit, and he wished some manner to stabilize them. So after doing away with the bottom 2.Five inches from each leg, he lessen four 1.Seventy five-inch square blocks out of two-by means of-4, pressed them into the ends of the legs, and fixed them in location.
Once this was done, he assembled a little "pagoda" out of scrap wood to sit on top of the Lack. The stand itself was simple enough to build: he just cut one large piece and two smaller upright pieces and attached them together with wood screws and glue. However, attaching this new piece to the top of the Lack proved a bit trickier. He couldn't simply run wood screws up through the underside of the tabletop, because the tabletop, like the legs, is hollow and can't hold a screw in place. He could have simply screwed them up through the thin veneer of the top and into the solid wood of the stand legs, but he feared this wouldn't be stable enough.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself in the form of the leftover hardware from last month's futon misadventure. Since we ended up using only one of the three cross-dowel nuts from the hardware that White Lotus sent us, we still had two left, and these looked like the perfect tool for securing the bolt in place. Brian started by drilling a horizontal hole through each vertical support of the monitor stand. Then he drilled two long vertical holes up through the hollow top of the table and into the wood of the supports, intersecting with the holes he'd already drilled across in the other direction. Once all the holes were in place, he fed a cross-dowel nut into each horizontal hole and screwed a long bolt into the vertical hole and through the cross-dowel nut. Then all he had to do was tighten up those cross-dowel nuts to make everything rock solid. (That explanation was probably incredibly confusing, but if you look at this little cutaway diagram that Brian drew, it should make more sense.)
Here's the newly remodeled piece in Brian's workspace. The monitor and keyboard are now at the correct heights respective to each other, but the surface is still a bit small to accommodate the keyboard and mouse. For now, he's compensated for that by setting the Lack atop his desk at a slight angle, so he can lay the keyboard and the mouse pad diagonally across the top of the Lack desk. However, if this doesn't work out in the long run, you may be seeing yet another post sometime in the future about the Lack sitting/standing desk, version 3.0.
Oh, and incidentally, the cut-off ends of the Lack table legs did not go to waste. I was able to put these four little square bins to use holding paper clips and various gewgaws on my desk—a rather tidier solution than the assortment of small bins and origami boxes I'd been using before. Waste not, want not, that's the ecofrugal way.
