Building a DIY height adjustable table for less than 100 €.

Looking for a manual height adjustable table, I couldn’t find one that wasn’t either super slow (Swedish budget solution), soul less looking or way to expensive. So having just bought a 3d printer I decided to build a setup myself. The materials should be easy accessible and the setup buildable without a proper workshop. As a result, the only complex geometries (the joints) were optimised for a 3d printer to do the otherwise hard work.

The form is purely functional and openly shows the structure with its mechanic easy to see through. Trying out different materials (e.g. broom sticks instead of copper tubes), the flexibility of the basic physical design became obvious. With several iterations, the need for tools was more and more reduced. This also made the assembly faster. The result is “Kochlöffel” version 1.0, which also serves as spare parts in case of a pasta alarm or a drink shortage ;)

In case you find can relate to the unsatisfying situation of no proper work desk, feel free to use the Kochlöffel design, improve it and adjust it to your needs. I’d be curious what you come up with. Hint: It also works with chop sticks. Forks and knifes are not recommended ;)

Key features of Kochlöffel, version 1.0:

fast height adjustment (~ 5 s)
buildable by one person with basic tools
highly customisable
honest materials, easy to recycle
no electricity needed

An earlier version with more indivduel parts and the need to drill holes in the size of the tube. The stacked batten under the table top also caused a general higher build.

The printed parts

All the parts were designed not to need support and to distribute the incoming force without layers tearing. Since I liked the copper tone, I adjusted all the parts to fit the German standard 22 mm diameter. Printing the parts with my ender 3 took roughly two days (ca. 43h) and about 480g of PLA filament. To test this prototype setup, I printed with a layer height of 0.3 mm and haven't had ad problem with breaking parts.