This is the third or fourth iteration of a DIY pole desk. Scroll down to see it in action. The base is from an old office chair with cast concrete for the weight. The post really is an old fence post from the pile of farm junk down the back of the paddock.
The fence post was water blasted and then sanded back to bare clean wood. I then used stains and paint to approximate how it looked outside. The cracks and divots have been emphasised with a black stain. It’s really more solid than it looks.
For the concrete base, I dug a few buckets of gravel and sand from the creek down the back. There’s also a nice seam of plastic clay in the creek bed so I hauled back a couple of buckets of that as well.
I turned the chair base upside down and used the clay to create a mould to pour the concrete. The dowels are to create holes to bolt the base to the chair. I pressed the larger stones into the clay to form the pattern on the top. Many of the stones were not held well when the concrete set but I still like the pattern. Being that type of person, I did make a mock up in Blender and use the 3D print add-on to check the volume was going to be about right. But then in making it was a lot more like mud pies than precision. The clay was so nice, it makes me want to get friendly with a local potter just to see what temperature it might fire at (can’t keep an old potter out of the mud…).
The top of the concrete ( or the bottom when its up the right way) was pretty rough so I cut a decagon out of plywood and painted it black. The ply is bolted to the chair base with the concrete sandwiched in the middle. There’s lots of cut up bike inner tube between the ply and the concrete to spread the load a bit.
Here’s some details of the staining and painting. I used a coarse sand gel paint medium to get the gritty lichen texture.
The band of green paint has a crackle medium under it, but I don’t think I put it on thick enough as it’ didn’t come out as strong as I’d like. A bit of work with some sandpaper gave the worn look I was after.
And here it is in use. The monitors, laptop, keyboard and tablet are all held in place on the post via standard office workstation components.
The arms are all adjustable and the desk can be used sitting as above, or standing as below.
You can see i have a cable management problem and I’ve got some bits ordered to help tidy that up. The two monitors can be switched individually between the laptop (work) and the large CPU (graphics etc.) via a couple of HDMI switches. I’m going to mount a single PD power supply that will power both monitors and the laptop.
The whole rig is designed to be easily portable. I can work in the back office watching the bell-birds on the fuchsia outside the window, or in front of the fire in winter or under the air-con in summer.
I’m really pleased with this, its of the land of our new rural block. Its really stable and best of all there are no flat surfaces to accumulate paper. Just a bin in the corner for filing.