Update: That cable tray took me 6 hours to install properly

I picked up a simple under-desk cable tray from Home Depot thinking it would be a 30 minute job. After misreading the instructions and drilling into a desk leg bracket twice, I had to patch the holes and start over. Then I realized my power strip was too wide for the mounting clips so I had to rig something with zip ties. Did anyone else fight with a cheap cable tray way longer than you expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

robin89617d agoTop Commenter

Disagree with @hannahj49 here. Six hours is totally reasonable for a first time if you care about it looking clean. Rushing a cable tray job just means you'll have wobbly cables and crooked brackets forever.

martinez.paul17d ago

Buddy of mine tried the same thing last summer. He spent almost five hours fighting with a tray from some off brand on Amazon. He got the brackets on backwards twice and strip a screw so bad he had to dremel it out. Then his surge protector was too fat for the tray so he ended up drilling extra holes in the tray itself to mount the power strip underneath. Looked like a junkyard under his desk when he was done but he said it worked fine. Never doing that again was his last text about it.

hannahj4917d ago

Six hours for a cable tray is wild. I’ve installed three of those cheap metal trays from different brands and the longest one took maybe 90 minutes because I had to trim the mounting brackets with tin snips. The instructions are always trash, but if you lay everything out on the floor first and test fit the power strip and cables before drilling, you save so much headache. Drilling into desk legs is the kind of mistake you only make once, though.