Standing desk with a clever twist

Standing desks (also known as sit-stand desks) are somewhat polarizing. The height is adjustable, but the idea is that you go from sitting to standing as you work. Hundreds of manufacturers exist, but they are all the same. Two extending metal legs and one or more motors to move the legs up and down. [JAR Made] tried to do something slightly different for their standing desk with a curved surface that extends.

Building started with a beautiful alder that was square milled with a chainsaw and planer - no jointer needed. However, he wanted long boards and was debating how to butt the pieces together and settled on pocket holes with pegs to try and clamp the boards together while the glue dried. [JAR Made] was unhappy with the resulting product. It pivoted on its feet replacing Baltic birch plywood with the main surface of the desk. Which was bent using a cutting technique (albeit just using a chainsaw rather than a CNC drill bit).

This is where you can see him learning from his previous mistakes. He cut a U-turn in the plywood for the butt joint to give it more strength, and designed a clever clamping mechanism using CA glue and painter's tape to achieve good clamping pressure. The early alder was used to act as the front edge for the plywood and as a groove to hold the sliding piece of plywood which extends and retracts as the desk rises and falls.

Old regular standing desk legs screw into the underside of the desk and allow it to move up and down. All in all, it's a wonderful build of a gorgeous desk. We love to see people make mistakes and then pivot and learn from them. Perhaps the next step is to automate the desktop to move on its own.