I wanna build, yet another, wheelie desk
like I've built, like before.
This one is for taking to my in-laws
and I've already printed out some of my modified
plans for this, and here's some of the wood I've
picked out to use for this. And, this is actually a
pallet wood project in some ways, because
some of this wood came from pallets, it's just been
planed since then.
I'm normally too lazy to set-up a dado-stack,
but for the vertical adjustment, the legs have
each three grooves in them for the
parts that telescope against each other,
and so I bothered to set-up a dado-stack,
because I need to cut 12 of these and they all need
to be very consistent and precise.
Now, I need these at exactly 30 millimeter increments
from each other, and the easiest way is just
to measure to the blade with a set of calipers.
But, because I might have a slight bit of wobble on here
I'm just gonna mark which tooth I measured to,
so when I measure the next time,
I'm gonna measure to the same one.
Well, these fit against each other very tight.
That would be OK for a joint, but these are actually
supposed to be able to slide against each other,
so I'll have to make another cut and widen those
up a tiny bit. So, this time I'm setting
the fence to be .3 millimeters closer,
which should widen the slots by that much.
That's better. That was the first time I've
used that dado stack in years.
Next, I trimmed all the legs to 90 millimeters in width.
Having cut the vertical pieces of the legs, I need to
cut the horizontals, and I was able to get
these two out of one piece of pallet wood,
and the top horizontal parts are actually tapered
so I'm able to get two of those out of one piece, like this.
I just milled up the bottom horizontal part of the legs
and the top part, that attaches to the bottom of the desk top.
And, these go together, like this.
And, with these sliding bits, I'll be able to adjust
the height, and these are slightly offset here,
so that I can bring the height way down,
and actually slide this past the leg.
Now, I need to make a, sort of, a T-joint here,
and I'm gonna use two mortise and tenon joints
and I finally made a test joint on the pantorouter
like this. Normally I would just join
these with one big mortise and tenon joint, using a
homemade template like this one, but I wanted
to try out these templates here, and just by putting
two side by side on this template holder, I can
get those very accurately.
And they also have a little slot in the side,
which makes it easy to go from one to the other
when cutting the mortises.
When cutting big mortises in hardwood,
It's best to use a spiral bit and just hog out
most of the material by making a series
of plunge cuts.
I only have four mortises to cut
and the set-up for each one is a little bit different
so I didn't bother setting up any stops,
so all I do is just put this at the end of it's travel
and line it up with the mark that I made on the piece of wood
Next I need to mill the tenons that fit into the mortises,
and those are gonna be laid out
roughly like this, and that leaves an awful
lot of material here that I need to cut away
with a router, so I'll cut away most of it with a table saw.
So, now that'll assemble
to armchair desk height,
to standing desk height.
I need some method of keeping these leg assemblies
from tipping to the side, so I'm gonna make
a bracket, like this,
and that's gonna attach to here, and that'll
stabilize it against side-to-side.
To join the corners of the bracket, I'm just making some
bridal joints with my quickset tenon jig.
Now I'm moving the stops in by the thickness of my blade,
which happens to be a hundred thou.
I'm adding a rabbet to the corner of this piece
to make it fit around the leg nicely.
It wasn't quite worth setting up the machine to cut out
that little corner.
Now, some holes in this bracket for some alignment pins.
I'm only using my hand drill to transfer the location
of the holes, and then I'll drill it out on the drill pad.
And, a few tricks that I use to get these holes
consistent and precise. First, I mark 'em every
3 centimeters, just with a pencil
off the tape measure, then I made a very
fine scoring cut in here, which allowed me
to get everything centered, and I used a relatively
dull center-punch to punch the centers of these holes,
and there's always gonna be tear-out on the back
when I drill through, so I drilled almost
all the way through and then I'll finish the hole
from the other side.
So, I punched every third hole for the end here,
and offset it by a centimeter and a half
and then punched every third hole again
and that gives me 4 1/2 centimeter spacing
for the holes here.
I counter-bored these holes so that I could
then insert nuts in here,
which are cheaper than threaded inserts.
And, the way this works is, we have a hole here
every three centimeters and there's gonna be
two holes that are exposed, and if I move this
by just a centimeter and a half,
we have again, at least two holes that are exposed,
which means by having a hole every three centimeters,
and a hole every 4 1/2 on here,
I can get adjustment increments
of 1 1/2 centimeters.
This piece of wood was part of a headboard
from the garbage, and I've already started stripping
some of the varnish off of it. But, it's got this, kind of,
purplish tinge to it
so I've tried it on the back, and I think I like that
side better.
It's too much work with the scraper alone.
I want to make some trim to go around it out of
White Ash, and I'm gonna put that around, like this.
Now, if this panel was actually truly solid wood,
the expansion this way would eventually cause that to
pop off, but if you look very carefully here, there's
actually a layer of veneer running this way on the
top and bottom, and that stabilizes it,
which makes it safe to put this on here.
Now, to reinforce the corners, I'm gonna make
a sort of a box jointy thing like this here
with my quickset tenon jig.
To cut these joints, I'm using the template feature
of my quickset tenon jig, which I haven't actually used
in a project before, and this bolt here,
catches in the notches here, so I just lift that up
to go to the next notch, and cut that next slot.
Now, to move from one set of cuts to the
matching set of cuts, I just need to offset this template
by half the width of one of these fingers here,
so, just moving it like that, and I'm ready to
cut the other ones.
I glued together two pieces of trim, and now I'm
attaching those to the top.
With the glue on the first two pieces dried,
I can now glue on the other two.
I'm rounding the corners of the top, and then
adding a quarter inch round-over all the way around.
The really small holes I'm drilling through are just
as a reference for where to put the alignment pins.
I'm using this block of scrap wood, both as an
angle-guide and as a depth-stop.
My insertion tool is just a screwdriver bit
that I put in a drill, backwards.
So, these little dowels are actually alignment pins,
and when doing that sort of thing, always put
the alignment pin in the edge of the piece of wood,
because if you were to put it in here, it would always
stick out and make it more difficult to pack this thing.
Also, make the hole it fits into, always a tiny bit
larger, so you don't get stuck.
[5.24] And these pins, the way they are right now, makes it
much easier to hit the threaded inserts.
Star knobs can be expensive to buy, but they're really
not hard to make.
Set to maximum height, this actually makes
a pretty decent standing desk, but that's not actually
it's primary purpose.
It's actually meant to be a very low desk, that you
pull up to a couch, and for that it needs some wheels.