I'm making my girlfriend an auxiliary table for her desk, since she has one of those desks with a keyboard tray which is annoyingly wide enough to get in the way but not wide enough to use the mouse to the side of the keyboard, and she'd like to. I have the whole thing done apart from one last detail - currently it works like this:
- There's a two-part clamp which grips around a pillar that's already there on her desk, and is held in place with a pair of carriage bolts and butterfly nuts. This holds incredibly well to the table pillar, I'm quite happy with that.
- At the end of the clamp is a horizontal-axis hole, so that the table can be tilted up and down slightly.
- The table itself has a support bar running alongside the underneath, which also has a horizontal hole through it, which is held on to the clamp part with another carriage-bolt/butterfly-nut combination.
I realise it would be much easier to visualise with pictures, but I was hoping to find something at the local hardware place and they didn't have anything that looked likely.
The problem is that the table-tilt axis doesn't hold very firmly. It's not awful, if I tighten it up it takes quite a bit of force to tilt it, but since it's going to have an arm resting on it I'm worried it may slump over time. In the worst case, I can use a locking pin with a series of small holes drilled at different rotations, which would more or less solve the problem, but not be very elegant. I've seen some two-part hardware which goes in the middle of the bolted-together joint to lock the rotation once the bolt is tightened... but I've not seen it for sale, and I have no idea what it might be called. Does anyone recognise the idea, have any clue what I might look/ask for?
- There's a two-part clamp which grips around a pillar that's already there on her desk, and is held in place with a pair of carriage bolts and butterfly nuts. This holds incredibly well to the table pillar, I'm quite happy with that.
- At the end of the clamp is a horizontal-axis hole, so that the table can be tilted up and down slightly.
- The table itself has a support bar running alongside the underneath, which also has a horizontal hole through it, which is held on to the clamp part with another carriage-bolt/butterfly-nut combination.
I realise it would be much easier to visualise with pictures, but I was hoping to find something at the local hardware place and they didn't have anything that looked likely.
The problem is that the table-tilt axis doesn't hold very firmly. It's not awful, if I tighten it up it takes quite a bit of force to tilt it, but since it's going to have an arm resting on it I'm worried it may slump over time. In the worst case, I can use a locking pin with a series of small holes drilled at different rotations, which would more or less solve the problem, but not be very elegant. I've seen some two-part hardware which goes in the middle of the bolted-together joint to lock the rotation once the bolt is tightened... but I've not seen it for sale, and I have no idea what it might be called. Does anyone recognise the idea, have any clue what I might look/ask for?
