I'm going to quibble with the other response about the arm above being over-engineering. You're copying existing designs instead of trying to work out your own geometries. You could probably move the moving parts behind the monitor, but I don't know how hard a time you'd have keeping the footprint from increasing.
This thing is a nice first prototype, but it looks like a death trap. There is absolutely no reason for the giant lever arm coming up from behind you and all the way around.
Look at the altwork design. It's a lot lighter and more robust. It doesn't place a ton of weight overhead, and there's a lot less leverage on the joints. Or look at ErgoQuest. The monitors are stationary, and only a lightweight desk/keyboard tray moves.
I appreciate your confidence, but I'm afraid it's misplaced. I've been doing woodworking and engineering for a lot more than 15 years. A couple of things to consider:
"When you want to build this kind of structure, I'm not sure you can plan everything beforehand, there are always things that will happen that you didn't expect." You absolutely can. It just takes practice and experience. When I build something, I plan out what I do, and 9/10 it comes together on the first go. For my mentors, it's 10/10. The first few years I was doing this, it was 0/10.
"After a few failing choices, I ended up with a main pole of 7cm x 7cm." You generally want about a 10x safety margin for dynamic loading and similar issues. If you had a few failing designs, you're way too close to failing in your current design.
Back to the overengineering point: Simply using massive beams of wood and bolts doesn't necessarily make things robust. A 7cm x 7cm piece of wood weighs a ton, and puts that much more strain on everything. That's true for all the pieces. I could build a more robust design with normal-sized boards. That has the distinct advantage that if there is a failure, what falls on me my hurt me, but won't kill or cripple me.
I'm glad you're trying, but by overestimating your expertise, you're putting yourself at risk. I'd encourage you to keep trying, but to also take this sort of constructive criticism seriously.
Think through how the desk ought to move so you don't need the giant lever arm, whether you want the monitors to move at all, and where to mount these so you can get in and out easily. I can think of a half-dozen designs where there are no massive lever arms, where nothing moves or just the keyboard tray moves, where if things break, I don't die, and generally simpler, lighter, and more robust.
The people who actually build cool stuff left because they didn't like a bunch of people with little to no experience in the things they are doing telling them about how they should have done them and that should have worn more safety glasses, used more jack stands and that a Dremel is going to eat their hand if they use it while wearing work gloves. Nobody who's actually contributing content of any value is going to stick around somewhere they have to take shit from a bunch of internet riff-raff that isn't contributing anything.
There's calling out stuff that's actually unlikely to last and there's pandering to the safety crowd for virtue points and the publicly accessible internet is rife with the former while actual constructive criticism is proportionally rare. For every comment to the tune of "you should consider fastener X because your application is Y and that plays to X's strength Z" there are ten teenagers (or adults acting like teenagers) making some low effort jab about something in the building code, or some written list of best practices, they don't understand the reasons behind.
It takes time and effort to build something. It doesn't take any time and effort to make some quip about PPE so that a bunch of teenagers can click on an up arrow and you can get your fix. The people actually building things got sick of being used like that.
try /r/woodworking for a more mature conversation.
The people who know they fucked up post self-deprecating pictures for a group chuckle. Showing your first dovetail (even if it looks like a 10 year old made it) is practically a rite of passage. The rest of the projects are usually small enough they can't kill people, or anchored to the floor so you might lose a toe at worst.
Ah, yes. The exact realization I had, 26 years ago, which made me finally give up on asking questions in EFNet #Linux.
http://www.ergoquest.com/overbed-workstations.html
These contraptions cost more than my car... But they do seem to be safer. Nothing hanging above the user's head.
I was trying to find a used/rent/borrow arrangement for a device called a log arch a few years ago, to help with a landscaping project. This is how I discovered just how many people have learned to basic to intermediate welding to avoid the labor costs of having someone else do low-volume work for them. Especially out in the boonies.
Seriously, everytime there is some kind of pro-urbanist post here on HN, I think to myself "sure, but noise". And people who don't value peace and quiet.
Now if you have any ideas for noise outside I'm open :-) A hipster bar opened opposite last year (when we moved in there was a commercial unit that had been empty for a few years, turns out it was a restaurant with alcohol license before), and we regularly have drunk people speaking loudly/shouting outside in the evenings from Thursday - Saturday. We can obviously close the window (triple glazed), but it's nice to have a breeze coming in.
I live in an earthquake zone. Masonry construction is illegal on almost the entire US West Coast.
You do you, but this is my apartment. It is there especially to allow me to do the things that I want to do.
If this person is not doing carpentry work at 12 o’clock at night, they’re not disturbing anyone with their activities.
I live in NYC and do projects like this chair all the time. I talk to my neighbors and ask them when they wont be home or when would be a good time to do X hours of work.
Most of the time they say don't worry about it as long as it's not past like 9pm or before 10am. I extend the same courtesy to my neighbors in turn. Just communicate and be reasonable.
Your position is completely unrealistic. Everyone causes a disturbance at times, but we generally try to minimize it and limit it to reasonable hours.
See, this is where our opinion differs. I am perfectly ok with anyone doing it. I think this probably heavily depends on the culture you grew up in.
Or maybe some people are just intollerant, I really don’t know.
It doesn't have to be loud!
I literally vacuumed under my sleeping girlfriend (and it's not like she sleeps that deeply on the sofa, it just wasn't louder than the running TV). The loudest part is, unless you turn it to max power, the scraping of the thing over the floor. Compare that to the upstairs neighbours, who we barely hear except when they vacuum.
My mom's first reaction, when I excitedly told her, was "yeah but those don't have any power". Not sure, I've used a bunch of vacuum cleaners over the years (old or second-hand in student rooms, newer stuff at my parents' house) and this one doesn't do any better or worse than others. The EU also reduced the max power of new vacuum cleaners, apparently they're overspec'd for the job and people just buy what they think will get them done faster I guess? Haven't read up on it, I just remember reading that the max power allowance went down as of some recent year. Perhaps the loudness is subconsciously a proxy for performance since an ordinary person can hardly measure suction directly?
In the EU, appliances have a score card. In the case of vacuum cleaners it contains things like how well it vacuums, how much dust comes back out while vacuuming, how loud it is, how much power it uses, and another stat or two that I don't remember. They're all roughly the same (I just walked through the store from vacuum to vacuum for each stat to see what the best is you can get per price category) in pretty much every stat except noise level and power usage. In those two categories you can win a bunch for virtually no extra money and I'm super happy with it.
Cities are just large human settlements with high density and a (mostly synthetic/mental) boundary defining it's area.
One of the many parts mostly any city has are residential areas. Noise is absolutely not desired there, even if you think it is. What you seem to be talking about are public, business and industrial areas for example. Demographic development has people living there, sure. But mostly because it's cheap because of the noise and other environmental issues.
Thankfully despite your opinion New York does a good job of putting these noise complainers in their place. Unless the noise is beyond the pale or at hours between 10pm and 7am, complainers are told to GTFO most of the time. Somehow the city still remains a highly sought after place to live, half of it because all the whiners who need silence for realigning their chakras have decamped to Hastings-on-Hudson.
In an attempt to be more of the former than the latter, if the string or especially that strut sheer off of their mounts, that whole contraption is slamming down. Your groin is pretty well protected, but you can still catch that upper bit in the teeth. Figure out how far stuff should move and add stops to keep it from going a hair farther. Replace most of the nails with bolts (beware of end grain, which can split, in which case nail/bolt makes little difference).
Aside: My personal favorite trick that doesn't get used enough is eddy currents. If something has to move easily but not too quickly, a piece of aluminum, copper (or I think non-ferrous steel?) and a rare earth magnet will decrease the terminal velocity of the moving bit. You still take a hit, but you might walk away from it.