One
of my all time favorite woodworking projects so far in my short woodworking
career is the birch computer desk that now occupies my home office.
Actually,
the desk was among a three component set of plans that I got from Workbench
Magazine (Volume 61 - No. 2, Issue 288, April 2005). I completed
the  desk
in 2006 and got pulled off the project by orders from the "boss" to build
some Shaker styled cabinets for our kitchen. I have not gotten back
to finishing the other components of the set. Guess I'll do
that when the kitchen cabinets are done.
There
is still a lateral filing cabinet and printer stand to build in order to
complete the office set. You can see from the photos that the desk
turned out fairly well and if I'm lucky enough, the other two pieces will
be at least as satisfying to me as the desk was.
During
this project, I got my first experience at mounting full extension drawer
slides and I'll have to admit, it wasn't the easiest thing to do for someone
who had not attempted this before. It may be a piece of cake for
those of you who have done this several times. In fact, it was easier
for me as well when mounting these slides in my lower kitchen cabinets.
The feel of the finished desk drawers (when pulling them out and pushing
them back in) is not as smooth as the ones that I mounted in the kitchen
cabinets. I paid a lot more attention to the clearances the second
time around than I did the first time I tried this.
The
drawers in the desk are not really binding up anywhere, they are just not
as smooth as those in the kitchen cabinets. After I get the lateral
file cabinet and printer stand finished, I may elect to investigate what
is causing the difference in feel and try to fix it.
Even
though the outward appearance of the finished desk is excellent, there
is one thing that you can't see that I also had a problem with and that
is the mounting of the hinges to the flip down keyboard drawer. I
tried following the instructions on how to do this that was in the article
(plans) from the magazine. Sometimes these types of articles and/or
plans have areas that are vague in the descriptions (or maybe my brain
conceives them as being vague) but in either case, I didn't get the mortises
cut correctly and had to use filler around the hinges. It doesn't
really look that bad as you can see in the photo, but it isn't correctly
done for sure! There may be a point where I'll redo this as well.
But
as you know, this is how you learn and that is what this web site is all
about. We make the statement that 'Ol Dave's Woodshop is "Where woodworkers
are not all Pros" and after all, we sometimes need to illustrate that within
some of our projects!!
Getting
back to the desk, the close-up of the solid edges on the top turned out
very well (see photo). I put a 3 inch edge of solid maple around
the desk top and used a 1/8 inch groove cutting router bit to make a tongue
and groove effect to hold the edge to the veneered plywood top. After
the edge was mounted to the top, I routed a 1/2 inch bevel around the perimeter.
There
are a couple of other features that I like about the design of this computer
desk:
(1)
There is very good management of the wire and cables coming from the computer
CPU in the right hand tower. This may all be a mute point down the
road however as computers are migrating more and more to wireless components
and/or hardware. At any rate, with my older computer with all the
cables attached, this is a plus because you cannot see them spread all
over the place. The design provides for an open slot at the rear
and top of the right side tower to run them through and they terminate
in a PVC channel mounted up and to the back of the center of the desk.
I routed a 3/4" wide slot just beneath the monitor perch at the rear of
the desk and these cables then can be fed through the PVC channel and up
through the slot to give the monitor a wireless appearance. Very
Cool!
(2)
The other thing is, the right side tower has a removable bar-type panel
to allow the CPU to get ambient air to the back side helping it to run
cooler. This removable panel also allows for easy access to the ports,
etc at the rear of the box. To remove the panel, all you really need
to do is raise it up slightly and it slides right out of the cavity at
the rear of the "box" better known as the right side tower.
There
were really no other outstanding challenges beyond getting good square
cuts on everything. I enjoyed making this desk and am looking forward
to finishing the other two pieces in the suite. I would be interested
in any comments you viewers have about this project. You can e-mail
me the comments or if you have a project of your own that you would want
me to post to these pages.
Dave
dave@oldaveswoodshop.com
|