Maple Knock Down Desk

A week before Christmas, my youngest daughter requested a knockdown desk for her apartment at college. As with most projects my daughters ask me to build, she didn’t really know what she wanted. She did want something with Asian influences and she wanted it to be light, but not painted. We spent some time looking at pictures on Google and came up with a basic idea. From there, I spent some time making a model in SketchUp and tweaked things a bit for her. A bit more time on SketchUp and I had the necessary dimensional drawings to build it.

Final Details:

48” long x 24” wide and 30” tall with a single 3” drawer. Walnut dowels were used as accents on the top, legs, and drawer

The desk is Maple, finished with Old Masters satin Armor Acrylic since it isn’t supposed to yellow with exposure to the sun like typical polyurethane. The top was waxed and hand rubbed to bring out a bit more sheen.

Build

There are a few details that make the desk more than just a top with 4 legs.

The legs are angled and tapered on both sides to provide more stability since there isn’t a back stretcher. I used a dado to cut a rabbet into the top of the legs that was the height of the apron (3”). That gave me an easy way to make sure the legs would be perpendicular to the apron. From there, a table saw taper jig made quick work of the tapers. The legs are glued to the apron with Walnut Miller dowels.

The legs slip into notches in the top frame:

I originally wasn’t intending to use knock down bolts but decided to use them to eliminate the wobble from the legs not being tight in the notches.

The leg edges have a 22.5 bevel as a way to make them look less stubby. Originally, the top support ends were going to be angled but they looked to stubby as well so I used a french curve to make a graceful curve. The edges were also beveled to eliminate the stubby look of square edges. The top was also beveled to match the other edge details.

-- Earl "I'm a pessamist - generally that increases the chance that things will turn out better than expected"