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Building a Trade Show Booth on a Budget |
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Part 2: Building the desk... With the podiums done, the next project was to build the desk that would span the rear of the booth. This acutally had three purposes:
The last item was pretty critical. An empty booth comes with a curtain in the back. This area represents your largest available space for messaging so it's important to use it effectively. However, it's also 80 square feet of space to cover which is more stuff that needs to fit into a truck and be installed. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use multiple banners to fill this space as they're easy to work with and roll up small. However, it would require a frame and some way to stretch the banners over the frame to make things look nice. I figured I could use conduit for the frame and work out the details at the end. Time to move on to the desk. The desk had to cover the entire back of the booth which is 10 feet (minus a few inches to account for rails between the booths). This would be too hard to build as a single unit so I divided it up into three pieces. This was handy as it would let me build a fairly small center piece and build the cabinet into that portion for easy transportation and assembly. The ends would be symmetric and continue with the oak/formica theme of the podiums. My plan was to build supports for the frame directly into the desktop units to keep everything nice and solid. That meant routing out a few hooks into the plywood: 
Next step was to drill and tap the holes for the compression fittings. Since it covers a lot of space, I figured I'd break up the lines a bit by adding a wave to the support pattern: 
I built the top of the desk in two pieces: the top oak surface and the bottom frame covered in formica. Since the formica would be bonded to this I needed a smooth surface around the curve. I used pieces of MDF to build up to the desired thickness and routed the edges off: 
I then completed the edge with more MDF: 
Next step is to cover things with formica: 
Here is a shot of one finished section: 
The next thing to do was the center section that had the cabinet. At this point I figured I could build the cabinet as a single unit that didn't disassemble. It would have been a fair amount of effort to make it come apart and make sure it wouldn't get damaged (think about all that assemble-it-yourself stuff you get with cams and such... one strong hit at a bad angle and stuff cracks). Anyways, worst case I could store stuff in the cabinet during transportation. Given this, the cabinet was pretty simple... pretty much all plywood. The shot below shows the sides with the formica edging in place before assembly: 
Here is the assembled unit with the back on: 
Next step is to add cabinet doors using some hidden hinges: 
Here is a shot of the assembled desk. There are bolts that hold the sections together and the tops down tight. They're not installed in this photo so seams aren't tight, etc: 
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