Steve's Radio Page Operating Desk

Well, cheap was the basic parameter of this exercise. I was on a budget. So the desk came from the Goodwill store for $30. Someone was renovating old buildings in Corpus Christi and every once in a while he would take a bunch of these from a building that wasn't used in 20 years and deliver them to all the Goodwill stores in town. I found one that has a loose leg and a few other problems, but these were easy to fix. The biggest problem was going to be storage. So I designed some shelves that I made from to sheets of oak veneer plywood. The shelves were rabbited and the parts were glued and nailed. It probably cost about $110 in materials. I finished the front edges with iron-on tape. It looks pretty good.


I had the boards cut at Home Dept because I knew that ripping a 4x8 sheet of this stuff would be difficult. I did trim them to all the same length on the table saw after I got the strips home.	I worked out pretty nice. I hade lots of room for radios and also room in front for operating.
Well I used this setup for a year but it felt very confining. I could sit at the center of the desk but the drawers on either side prevented me from moving around. The shelving was very pretty but tended to reduce the clearance on the top of the desk. I used this setup for about a year and then donated the shelving to the Driscoll Children's Hospital EOC that I helped to set up. I used just the table for another 6 months before deciding to replace it with a computer table so I could move around from left to right. No drawers to interfere with legroom. So I took a Sawsall to the old wooden table as it had become too heavy in my advancing years to move out of the house in one piece. That was of course a point of no return. We looked at tables at all t he computer and office supply stores, but instead of finding nice laminate tables with a rubber edge they were all particle board covered with wood grained paper. They were already showing wear in the stores. With my propensity for spilling thing,s I really wanted a laminate top table. I looked on the Internet and discovered that a laminate top table with no storage was up to about $250, and shipping was prohibitive. That's when we decided to try a used office furniture store. We found one and it had furniture in all types of condition. We found a laminate top table that was in pretty decent condition ($225), but of course I was thinking of how to provide storage. Then the proprietor said he had some stuff in the back, but it wasn't like I had described. For the heck of out I went there and saw a bunch of office modular furniture, some that was a bit scratched up. They were 75 inch by 75 inch Steelcase corner units with gigantic hutches. With the two sets of drawers it had a lot of storage. I started thinking that all my radio gear could fit overhead in the hutch. By mix and matching I found enough pieces to make up a full set that was not too scratched up. I said "OK, I'll take it." Getting it on the truck bed and into the shack was a bit of a chore, but I think it was worth it. This stuff is extremely heavy.

This is an overall view. It measures 75" by 75".	Note the 48 inch strip light beneath the hutch.

Close up of hutch.	Custom plywood connector for side piece.

Left side piece with drawers.	Main unit with drawers.
	The new TS-480 SAT. Note the 3/4 inch holes in the rear steel panel made with a Harbor Freight step drill bit and protected with Home Depot grommets (139377).

The side panels for the hutch and the desk are removable. Not only can you route the electrical inside the desk this way but you can put the worse looking panels where they will be seen the least. This way I was able to not have to repaint any part of the furniture.