Alright, some significant progress made today. First on the agenda was installing the oversized keyboard tray. You'd think Maverick would have had this all worked out, since I bought the desk and keyboard tray at the same time - obviously I intended to use the larger tray in place of the standard one. But my cardboard template for the bracket locations revealed a big problem:
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In the tray's optimal location one of the desk's metal brackets for connecting the right side interferes with one of the tray's brackets. Dang it. Since there was no way I was drilling two holes through 1/8" hardened steel the only workable solution was push the tray back:
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The bad news about this is now the tray doesn't extend as far as it's meant to:
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For what this desk cost, the expectations were a lot higher than the shoddy manufacturing I'm seeing. Luckily my ergo-keyboard is large enough that I can just pull it back while working, but really - at $3,500 I shouldn't have to be doing that.
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After another seemingly daily trip to a home-improvement store getting replacement drawer sliders for another customization, I finally got all the pieces assembled from the initial furniture delivery and after 3 months of working from the kitchen table I get to start working from my new desk tomorrow:
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And now a brief up-close "tour" beginning with how most of today was spent, left-side customizations:
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Up top is an office drawer so I don't need to keep all my pens, stapler, USB drives, etc on the desk anymore. Under that is a roll-out paper shelf for utilizing the space between the top drawer and laser printer, which was a good use of the standard keyboard tray that came with the desk (but needed its width trimmed 1/8" to fit the opening). At the bottom is a roll-out printer shelf, handy for accessing a flatbed scanner on top of the machine. And yes, all the work was done with my typical attention to detail:
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Here's why I wanted an oversized keyboard tray (the TRON mousepad probably isn't Starfleet regulation):
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Lastly, hidden under the desk beside the right-side drawers is a PC shelf:
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Although my job remote-work system uses an HP notebook and I use a MacBook Pro for anything "serious", an ancient 32-bit Windoze PC is needed for interfacing with my Alps printer, so this shelf provides a nice out-of-the-way place for that computer.
The next few days will be mostly just "moving in" work (populating the cabinets and drawers) and finishing the gray transformation of the long shelf going above the closet doors. I'm also ready to start working out the desk intercom location and assigning functions to the 8 rocker switches. Each switch will be functional, such as activating the monitors (I mean, viewscreens...), the old PC (so I don't need to reach under the desk), a KVM switch (for the two PC's to share the same keyboard, mouse, and monitors), hutch lighting, colored accent lighting in the room, etc.