Thank you to everyone who replied. I've revised the design based on some of the comments made, it now looks like this:

@Cotty, the desk I'm using at the moment has a very similar construction, i.e steel box section of the same dimensions. The top part doesn't have the diagonal supporting struts that you suggested and it has coped for several years with a succession of fairly heavy printers and speakers perched on it. I'll see what the guys at my local yard say, but thanks for the heads up on that.

@Olishea, I've increased the depth marginally from 55cms to 60cms. Again, this matches the dimensions of the desk I'm using at the moment and I find that to be more than enough.

And everyone who commented on the frame, you're absolutely right. After spending some time trawling through pictures of commercially made furniture, I've concluded that the cantilever style construction in the revised design will be plenty strong enough.

Just have to persuade my other half how nice it will look in real life...

Hi All:

Slowly getting the hang of Sketchup and I've roughed up a design for an 'L' shaped computer desk for home. I'm reasonably handy as far as woodworking is concerned, but I've got virtually no experience with metalworking.

I've attached an image of how I imagine the desk will look. It's constructed from a number of fairly simple components, bolted together with M5 fixings and specially shaped brackets cut and drilled from 1.6mm (i.e. 16swg) mild steel. The majority of the frame would be fabricated from 20mm X 20mm (3/4" x 3/4") box section, apart from the base and the part that the wooden desktop sits on, which would be made from 50mm x 25mm (2" x 1") box section. The general idea is that I'll be able to generate a set of 2D drawings from my SU model, take these to a local fabrication yard along with my raw materials and have them weld, cut and drill everything accurately, leaving me with a giant metal construction kit to take home and assemble.

The part that I'm not sure about is whether steel or aluminium would be more suitable for the main part of the construction. On the one hand, I imagine steel would be stronger, but it would also be considerably heavier than aluminium. I don't want to end up with something that weighs too much, but at the same time it needs to be reasonably strong, both to support its own weight and the weight of the monitors, printer, etc, etc that will be sitting on it.

Just wondered if anybody on here has the 'real-world' engineering experience to be able to offer an opinion one way or the other.

Edit: Just to put some scale to it, here's how the desk would look populated with 3 22" monitors, an inkjet printer and a tower-style computer plus accessories:

Use the zoom tool - and use it a lot

I had some odd problems with straight lines refusing to join up with other straight lines, faces which should have been at right angles to each other behaving as though they were seperate and what appeared to be other strange things going on with SU's inference engine.

What I'd forgotten was that the day before I'd been playing around trying to orient my model (our house) so that I could drop it onto Google Earth. When I zoomed in real close, the cause of all my problems became clear. When I'd rotated the whole model, I'd done so by about 178 degrees. As a result it was now slightly out of alignment with the red and green axes, causing all the inference problems I'd been seeing. Putting it back in line solved all the problems.

Just an observation as a "6 weeks up the learning curve" SU newbie:

I can't help but think that all those retailers of fancy household furniture and appliances are missing out on a marketing opportunity. Mrs PhilE and I have collected a 3-inch thick pile of kitchen and kitchen appliance catalogs from various suppliers, with a view to selecting something suitable in the next few months as part of an ongoing renovation project. If even one of those suppliers could include a link in their catalog from where SU components of some or all of their stock lines could be downloaded, it would make the whole process so much easier and people like me would probably be much more likely to buy from them.

Most places seem to have their own in-store designers with CAD software to quickly mock up interior designs, so I guess they're hoping that by having you in-store they will be able to tempt you into buying more stuff than you were thinking of to begin with.

I'm not sure if the situaton is any different in the USA, but here in the UK, I've not been able to find a single major supplier who even knows what SU is, much less has anything they can offer to help out the DIY designer.

Hi All:

Just signed up, so I thought I'd say hello to get my account fully up and running. I'm based on the south coast of the UK and I'm a total newbie as far as Sketchup is concerned, although I do have a little experience using other 2D CAD software to design RC model aircraft and the occasional woodworking project. My day job is managing and supporting the server infrastructure for a telecommunications company, in my spare time I'm a part time contributor to some open-source software projects based around the Python scripting language and I'm trying to save enough money to complete my private pilots licence while I still have (most of) my physical and mental faculties.

I've installed SU8 on my laptop tonight and looked at the first of the tutorial videos. My main interest at the moment is to create 3D models of the outside and inside of our family home, so I can try out some ideas that my wife and I have for sprucing the place up a little. I'm going to spend some time watching the rest of the tutorial vids and lurking on here to pick up hints and tips from the experts - some of the examples posted in the gallery forum are extremely impressive!!!

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Regards

Phil Edwards
Brighton, UK