A Weekend Project

 

Some days I get bored. Well, I’m always bored to some degree or another. Some days I do something about it.

There is a project I have always wanted to make. It’s on my ‘To Build’ list.  And about six years ago I bought the plans to make it.

What is it? The plans I bought were for a roll top desk. I got them in the mail from a woodworking company I’ve dealt with. Looked at them, there was a single drawing and a fabrication booklet. And said, ‘I can do that. I think.’

Some time later I started. I decided to make the desktop first, for some reason. I selected the thickest boards I had left over from a purchase I made from a sawmill in Connecticut some decades ago. I’ve been nibbling away at the pile of rough cut, New England oak boards for years, making wood floors and a staircase in my previous house up north, some furniture, cabinets, and whatnot.

After planing down my thickest boards to as close to one inch as possible, managing to make them seven eights of an inch thick, I jointed the edges and fit them as flat as I could so there would be no gaps in the desktop.

Some time around this point I realized that I had more pressing tasks at hand to occupy my boredom. The cardboard box I bought in Florida as a dwelling needed work, the wall-to-wall carpets were evolving life forms. The cabinets in the kitchen were literally falling apart, door by door. Some seriously lopsided trees were hanging over my house and garage and the landscaping was subpar at best.

OK. The necessary is the enemy of the entertaining.

So I set that particular vanity project on the back burner. But not without regret and an occasional rediscovery of the plans and a nod to the unfinished desktop boards leaning against a shelf in my shop.

About four months ago I was finishing up a project in my shop/nee garage, when I noticed the boards I had been honing to fit together to form a desk top.

'Hmm,' thought. 'I really should get back to that project. I've been wanting to finish the office in my house, it needs work, and a roll top desk would make a nice addition.'

And so this year I dubbed the Year of the Desk.

Plans within plans. OK, just one plan.

‘Let's see here,’ I mused. ‘It's mostly panels held together with splines and pegs... Eight drawers... A tambour door-never made one of those before... Better make a small one first to practice. Maybe something I could make into a breadbox later?’ I was musing myself into excitement.

‘And curved panels for the top,’ I indulged in more musing. ‘That might be tough. Last time I did anything approaching this complexity I had to build a horizontal tray for my router. And where are the secret compartments? Well, they're secret, I guess.’

 

 

Panels, panels everywhere. There are a total of 28 panels in the desk.

Front facade

Like many pieces of furniture, a desk is simply an assembly of panels, rails, and styles with a few exotic pieces thrown in for good measure, measure twice, of course. The desk is constructed in two parts, the drawer bottom and the desk and tambour door top. Each can be made separately and bolted together.

So I made panels. Twenty-eight to be precise. Twenty-one for the bottom and seven for the top. The construction had to be very precise, as the finished desk had to be as square as possible, the rails and styles must form squares and rectangles, not parallelograms, and the finished desk must not tip or beg that a matchbook be placed in the corner for balance. And before I could glue all of them together, I had to install the levelers, eight of them, and the drawer slides, eight sets, for eight drawers, along with brackets, spacers, shims, and minor adjustments.

Due to a lack of clarity in the plans, I made the sides exactly three quarters of an inch too narrow. The blueprint showed all of the ‘visible’ dimensions. The bill of materials did not take into account that the rails fit into the styles and also only showed the visible size, not the absolute size. Luckily, the panels said, 'Size to fit, which should have warned me then and there not to take anything at face value. I cut the 'absolute' values absolutely and the 'to fit' values accordingly. So it fit exactly... three quarters of an inch too narrow.

Annoying, but not a big deal. It meant that I couldn’t entirely trust the plans. What will become of us? If we can’t trust the plans what can we trust? Well, mathematics, I guess. I had to triple check every dimension from that point on, once to make sure the plans were accurate, twice and make any necessary adjustments, and three times just because.

Dovetail jig for drawers

And finally! Gluing something together!

 

The desk is made in two sections: the lower half with the drawers and the upper half from the desktop up. I made the upper half 'to size' and let it overlap slightly, which is completely unnoticeable. I figured if I shortened the desktop to match the bottom it would cause problems somewhere else. Nothing causes problems like solutions. Luckily, I could make the upper part of the desk ‘per plan’ and just have it overlap slightly more.

 

Things went smoothly engineering wise from then on.

The desktop was made from three boards, those three that I had already worked on four years ago, was it that long? Yes. Yes, it was. The side panels for the desktop were curved to accept the tambour door. That required making a specialty jig for my router table so I could guide it along the curved styles and panels. My fingers slipped on the last cut and I got a nasty gash on the knuckle of the right little finger. I was wearing gloves, but they were just cotton. A steel gauntlet would have worked better.

The tambour door was interesting. It was made of 34 slats glued to a canvas backing ‘duck.’ It took a while since I didn’t want to put too much glue on it. It still has to be flexible. So several of the slats were loose and had to be reglued and then cleaned of excess globs of glue. The procedure was to glue the slats onto the canvas, leave them for about forty-five minutes, then flex them so the slats only glue to the canvas and not to each other, then leave them overnight. The next day I would look for other slats that were coming loose and do it again.

Finally, I had a working tambour door. I assembled the desktop, sides, top, row of panels for the back, did I mention that I built a row of five panels to place on the back? All of the assembly was done with splines and pegs slathered in glue with only a few biscuits for the curved panels on the sides.

The tambour door was quite stiff and got stuck in the runners. It took a lot of finagling and adjusting and cleaning out glue boogers to get it to slide somewhat smoothly. It’s still a bit tight on the one curve which causes it to bend away from the canvas, causing the slats to jam into each other. Bending it with the canvas causes it to roll up quite nicely.

The last assembly was the box of drawers in the back of the desk. I installed an electric outlet with USB ports as well as house current.

And they all fit, even.

Template for the tambour door side panels.

Tambour door ready for gluing to the canvas backing 'duck'

Cubbie box dry fit

The desk is finished in dark walnut stain, hand rubbed tung oil and polyurethane, five coats each. It gave the finished piece a nice luster. There's a lock on the tambour door, strictly for decorative purposes only. You could open it with a church key.

As I was working on the desk a thought occurred to me. Will it fit into my house? The front door is OK, though the delivery guys had a devil of a time getting a refrigerator though it last year. They had to take it out of its cardboard box and it barely made it through. At least we didn’t have to take the doors off.

The desk is about 29.5 inches wide, it would have been more if I had gotten the dimensions right to begin with. I figured, ‘Well. Interior doors are 30 inches, so it should fit.’ I had designated a spare bedroom as my office and hoped it would fit in there without taking any doors off or taking a sledgehammer to the walls. Was I right?

Nope. The interior doors are 28 inches wide. Sledgehammer?

Terrific. I can put it in my living room but I really wanted it in a separate office so I could close the door and keep things undisturbed by cats. Well, that's what I get for buying a manufactured Hobbit house.

The living room it is.

Cubbie box finish gluing

Cubbie box installed into top

  

 

Cubbie drawers assembled

Final assembly

Let's see. Installed the goddess. Laid down the ancient curse. Hid secret manuscripts and map to Atlantis. Yup. All set.

Ready for action.

 And my first project made on my new desk.

Addendum.

One of the reasons I wanted to put my desk in my office was so I could have a quiet space to work, of course. But another was that I was afraid my cats would consider it to be a new scratch post and act accordingly. No sooner had Seeth and I moved the pieces of the desk to my living room, bolted it together and plugged it in than my cats were parked on it. It seems that they assumed it belonged to them. Cat's seem to have an innate sense of value and think all valuable things belong to them to be used or destroyed as they see fit.

But that solution to the cat claw problem had its own problem. One of my cats, Light by name, likes to sit on top of the desk and he will hiss at me angrily whenever I try to use it. "Um, do you mind if I pay my bills, Cat?"

That one really threw me for a loop.