construction of the desk

we began the desk by carving the legs. as the autocad design for the legs was slightly too complicated and time consuming we decided to change the design slightly. we then used 4x4 pine to make the legs. this was done on the lathe by Dan and myself. due to the size of the wood it was quite time consuming however we acomplished the design that we hoped for. the legs were the sanded on the lathe and stained with dark oak wood stain.













we ran into complicaions as the autocad sizes were not quite correct this left our desk legs considerably shorter than planned. to correct this we added leg extensions. blocks of the same size pine were cut to size. i drilled holes into the top of the pine and we hammered some 13mm dowel into the holes. we then lined the dowel up on the top of the legs and drilled a further two holes in each. once placed together, the extensions were complete and we sanded the tops to make them level and smooth.







the top of the desk was a simple rectangle of MDF screwed to the top of the legs. the desk was extremely flimsy at first so we strengthened it with braces, like the ones used to join the flats of the set. they were nailed onto the desk, using the air nailer, flush with the edges of the table, between each of the legs. we then used angled pieces of pine to strengthen these braces. the second job of the braces was to hold the mounting around the desk. these were pieces of pre-cut 6mm MDF that we attached to the braces, flush with the top of the desk. we used blocks of 18mm MDF to strengthen the corners between mountings.





when everything was attached we then marked on the design of the mount and cut it with the jigsaw. to make the top of the desk look more sturdy we cut a piece of 18mm MDF 2cm bigger than the original tabletop and glued it on. after it was in place we used the hand router to round the edges. we then varnished the mounting and tabletop. Nuria pre-cut some rectangles of 18mm MDF which i then glued together with a hot glue gun, this created the boxes that nuria glued onto the top/back of the desk. smaller pieces of 2mm MDF were then stuck onto the front of the boxes to create draws. i used dome headed brass pins to make draw handles. the mount that we were going to put on the back of the desk did not look of good enough quality so we decided against using it. the whole desk was then given a coat of wood stain varnish and placed into the study by the window.