Desk
In 2015, I wanted to make a corner desk for myself, using wooden boards, steel pipes, glass and hinges.
A few years earlier, I had made another desk using cherry wood. This one was intended to do a few things: fold flat (notice the hinges halfway up the table legs that can fold inward), support a computer, and have two pieces of acrylic that could fold up into boards I could use with dry-erase markers.
This desk lasted me a few years, but it turned out I almost never needed a desk that could fold flat, and in practice would often place my computer and other items on the surface, so I almost never made use of its whiteboard feature. After I decided to make my second desk, I eventually gave the cherry wood to a wood salvager, and donated the cherry wood-framed pieces of acrylic to a Willie Brown Middle School’s maker space.
To start, I wanted a frame that came pre-made so I could have a desk even as I worked through the process. This one came from IKEA.
I used African mahogany boards for this table, as they were available at Home Depot and not excessively expensive. Shown here are the boards after initially cutting them and laying them out together at Techshop.
After laying out the boards, I used a biscuit cutter to add slots to the wood, glued them together, and used clamps to hold the pieces together.
I took the boards home to ensure they fit properly. Success! I used the unfinished table for work for a while.
I bought a sander for this project, and it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
I wanted to have a small rectangular space for glass, so I could have some remnant of the whiteboard functionality I’d used on the original desk. After gluing these wooden pieces together, I used a CNC machine to cut out space for white glass (also bought from IKEA). This weakened the wooden structure a bit, so I added more glue to keep these boards together.
After coming home, I improperly used my balcony to add teak oil to the wood. I was very happy with the appearance as the oil went in.
After oil, a polycrylic covering, and a hole I cut out for a power socket, this was how the desk surface looked.
The CNC machine cut this shape out pretty well, but it required some additional filing to make everything fit properly.
After finishing with the wood, I started designing a pipe layout. This proved more complex and expensive than I’d anticipated; I had to make informed estimates, and then had to get pipes sized and threaded at Center Hardware (lesson: use Home Depot for this in the future; it’s significantly cheaper, and they don’t get as annoyed with big orders). After assembling and making 1-2 additional small orders to compensate for design mistakes, I painted the pipes with a base coat to ensure the paint would bond properly.
After the base coat I added flat black paint to get the appearance I wanted.
The corner piece features two small 90 degree angle pieces, which ultimately served to let the whiteboard glass panel tilt upward.