Hello!

It’s Week 10, of the Student Blogging Challenge, and I’ve just realized that it’s not actually week 10, but actually week five because we do two blogs per week so I should really stop calling them week 10. Anyways, spring break is right around the corner, and this week I get to talk about literally anything I want. So I’m going to talk about the new desk I want to make in my room. 

You see, my room is pretty small, and has no room for a desk. (It actually probably does have room but then I would have to move some stuff around and it would just be a lot less interesting). To get around the limited amount of space, I’m going to try to build a folding desk entirely from scratch that can fit under my bed. 

The Plan:

The design for the desk started a while ago when I first had the idea. I quickly drew my idea down in notes, so I wouldn’t forget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you can’t tell what’s happening after looking at my amazing drawings, let me elaborate a bit. The concept for this desk is to have two legs that would sit on the side of the bed, while the other two legs would have the ability to fold inward so the entire structure can be stored under the bed. Another design feature of this desk would also be the fact that you could bring the desk further over the bed. This would give the ability to either sit on a chair and use it like a normal desk, or sit on the bed and use it like a lap desk.

One problem of this design, would be that the legs don’t lock, and the desk would probably fall over quite easily. To fix this, I would need to have some kind of mechanism that could lock the legs in place. To do this, I think I will use a fence gate lock. Basically what would happen is that there would be a hook on the side of the leg. When the leg is folded out, this leg will catch on the fence gate lock, and prevent the leg from moving back

After this first design, I decided to try out a new app called Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a free 3-D modelling and designing software originally made for 3-D printers. Although it’s made for 3-D printers, it’s also got a lot of cool stuff on it, and still very useful even if you don’t have a 3-D printer. For example, one could use it to plan out their new desk to make sure it all fits. (I wonder who would do that?)

Check out my Folding Desk design here! You can even view it in AR!

Now because it’s not spring break yet, I haven’t actually started building the desk. So I can’t really tell you how well or poorly this project went. So I guess the best I can do is to hopefully create another short post after spring break with all of the results of this project.

I’ll see you soon,

Nolan

(Btw, If you’re also going to try and build something over the break, I would love to know. You can always post your ideas and or pictures in the comments for some more inspiration)

—————————————————————————————————————————————

Edit from the future.

The desk has been finished! It took way longer then expected, mainly from procrastinating but also with a few setbacks here and there. The main setbacks being the desktop being a real pain to glue together, and the locking mechanism not working. It turned out that the locking mechanism was probably unnecessary but is still a good safety precaution to make sure it doesn’t fold in on itself. Anyways it was quite fun to build and can be quite useful when doing tasks like writing this update.

Here are some pictures for anybody interested.