I’d been wanted to build myself a new desk for a while. The current one I had, while being a good size, was pretty terrible as a desk. The top surface was all flaking off, and it was a simple trestle style. Many years of heavy monitors had given it a distinct bow.

The place I’ve got my desk is also quite large, I can fit in something bigger than a standard 1.5m or 1.8m long desk. Trying to find bigger desks is hard, and quite expensive. The solution came to me when I was looking around Bunnings one day. They sell extruded aluminium tubes, and a bunch of angle connectors to join them together. You can basically make anything that’s of square design. I sketched up a design. The main requirement was strength, I didn’t want the desk to bow, particularly with its long 2.3m length. So I added a third leg, a third beam along the top and lots of cross-bracing.

Here’s the pile of beams from Bunnings:

I then cut them into shorter lengths with a hacksaw, and started joining them together.

Here you can see a couple of the angle-connectors.

Partially-assembled leg parts in a wine box:

The top surface is a giant piece of 22m MDF. This is definitely overkill, I should have gone with a thinner piece of MDF.

The two sides of the desk, with top. You can see the triple-leg design.

Here’s the final desk in action, complete with huge piles of crap.

The two vertical posts that you see on the right-side edge are for future upgrades – I’m thinking of putting some shelves above it. All up the total cost of the desk was about $220. I’m very happy with it. It’s large and strong, and doesn’t bend.