Desk Extender

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

Team: Iowa State 3D Printing & Design Club
Instructor: Emmanuel Agba

A piece of paper is roughly 8.5” wide and 11.5” tall. The typical lecture hall desk is slightly smaller than this. With one piece of paper, this is manageable however, when taking a test, there is: the scantron, your calculator, formula sheet, and the actual test. The papers refuse to be organized, the calculator is constantly sliding off the desk, and anything as small as an extra pencil has nowhere to go. Even during some lectures, having a binder can be troublesome to write on the left side. Students spend several hours a week in lecture halls and this problem can be easily fixed.

For our entry, we decided to improve the average lecture hall desk by extending it and making ideal improvements for everyday use. The extension is 215.9 mm x 228.6 mm x 17.78 mm and provides enough room to put one of the several components needed. This provides enough room to place anything the size of a sheet of paper on the side. The extension functions by placing it on top of the desk which removes some space however, an inch or two is lost to nearly double the desk space. Along with the added space, there is another area to put a pencil (the hole of the left side or the grove on the top of the face), a place to hang a calculator or water bottle (the hole on the top face, left side), and a place to sharpen your pencil (front face on the left side). The extension is also small and light enough to place into a book bag.

In the files we uploaded, there are two versions of the base. The first is our full scale design which is how we intend it to be. The other is the file we used to print our design. 80% scale was the largest we could print currently so we made the parts such as where the add ons attach, the bracket slides, and the pencil holders 125% larger. This is so when the file is formatted into g-code and brought to 80% scale, the other parts do not need to be scaled down with it. The Desk can be printed out of PLA, ABS, PETG. In our case, we used PLA to make our prototype and it gave a smooth surface to write on along with a durable part.