When a staff member asks for a standing height desk at the office, I raise their whole desktop to standing height, and then buy them a drafting chair or stool for when they want to sit. You can see examples of some of the desks I had built several years ago and then raised to standing height in December 2014 on my post My First Day of Winter Break from December 27, 2014.

Bruce and I have been talking about how to do standing height desks in our area without raising the more than 40 feet of continuous desktop that lines the walls of our office space. So I started looking at the desktops that sit on your desk and you pull them up to standing height, and lower them to sit. The problem is I’m tall, and Bruce is really tall, so most of the adjustable desktops that sit on your desk do not pull up high enough for either of us, and the pull-up desktops that do have a greater range of height are very expensive. I found hardware that I could build pull-up desktops with, but hardware that pulls up to a reasonable height, and is sturdy enough for daily use is also quite expensive.

While I was puttering around in my darkroom a few weeks ago, and messing with the enlarger, which has a sturdy, motorized chassis, I got a bright idea — if I can find a motorized enlarger frame on eBay for a reasonable price, I could build a motorized Sit/Stand desk. I searched eBay and found a chassis with no head for a Beseler 45 MX enlarger at a great price with reasonable shipping and bought it.

The chassis was delivered last Thursday, and I spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning making brackets, building the tops out of solid oak, putting it all together, with lots of help from and testing by the kitties. Then I took it all apart, put the pieces in the car,  drove it to the office, put it all back together on my desk, and loaded it up with monitors, keyboard and trackpad.

Now I’m working on getting another chassis so I can build one for Bruce. What’s really nice out using the motorized enlarger chassis as the base for a Sit/Stand desktop is that I can customize the brackets and shelves for the hardware and individual.