Plywood Desk In Progress

[cputnam]

Love it when the kids get involved.

[JohnnyEgo]

Thanks all. This is in part about working with my son, but in large part also being brave enough to put my actual work product out there, and the intro reflects that. Going for the 'middle-aged Dad build, one step up from a solid core door between two second-hand cabinets demographic' on this one.

So day 5, we cut a bunch of drawer parts.





And then my son went to bed and I recut every one of them out of Baltic Birch after reaching my absolute limit with this excremental Ecuadorian ply.




Which in light of the recent post asking about Baltic Birch, gives me the opportunity to rant for the benefit of anyone new to the many variations of plywood:
Two pieces of plywood of the same thickness, approximately .40 inches and marketed as 1/2" ply. The top one is the Ecuadorian Sandeply, and the bottom is the Baltic Birch. The top piece consists of 5 layers laminated together. Two paper-thin veneers, two layers of some sort of combo of softwood and filler, and a center ply of indeterminant origin, but probably pine. The Baltic Birch on the bottom consists of 13 layers of all Baltic Birch, all the same size. Some of them are ugly. The two faces are nice, and considerably thicker than the Sandeply face veneers.


If you aren't routing grooves in it, and you don't sand through the paper thin veneers, the Sandeply is good enough for things like the carcass construction of the pedestals. But it was a nightmare when it came time to route anything in it. Like the drawer runner grooves, for instance.


The Baltic Birch veneer exposed when I routed this dado is ugly. But it's all one piece and consistent in character.


The Sandeply, on the other hand, is fill of fun voids between the cruddy softwood plies and whatever binder they used to fill it.


It also would not hold a clean routed edge. Every piece had some sort of nasty little surprise.


So moral of the story is if you are going to butt joint everything and then use a pair of metal drawer slides, the cheap ply will do the job. But if you are going to route anything, you definitely want to spring for something better.

[Mags®]

You need a tv show... I would watch.  
  Johnny Dado, Gen x meets woodworking...

[®smpr_fi_mac®]

Hold up.  I'm 43 and Gen X.

[JohnnyEgo]

You and me both, my friend!

[JohnnyEgo]

Since you can read about my bad router choices in my thread in Power Tools, it should come as no surprise that I keep my boy well away from the router table. So no shop helper for these activities.

Decided to go with a lock miter over a false front or other options, mostly to maintain some degree of uniformity while also not using any extra wood.


I've always found these to be better in theory than in my actual execution, but I have picked up a few good tips here on how to do a better job. One of the most useful has been to carpet tape a piece of MDF to ride the fence and support that thin 45° outer edge.


Drawer face gets routed flat on the table, drawer sides get routed vertically.


Not bad for a first try. Only issue is that the drawer side miter is fractionally taller than the face miter. Should be an easy adjustment. One in which I will spend the next two hours and convert all of my remaining stock to scrap trying to perfect. Only to end up back where I started.

[JohnnyEgo]

So a recap of a few stolen hours through the course of the week:

Put a round-over on most of the exterior surfaces.



Then started to trim everything out. The last 20% of all my projects always seems to take up 80% of the build time, and this was no exception. Anyways, rather than measure, I tend to fit my trim to the actual carcass. First, I mark the rough length:


Close, but not close enough.


So I move to the shooting board, where I start trimming a few thousandths at a time with my #5 1/2 jack plane.


This lets me fit the piece fairly well, and minimizes cutting it just a hair too short, which I have done plenty of times before. This is good enough that a little bit of filling and sanding should clean it up nicely:


But I still need clearance between the stile and the top of the drawer. This is where the playing cards come in. Normally, I'd use only one to space out the drawers, but I feel like a coat of primer and two coats of paint might eat into that space pretty quick, so I am using two cards as the standard for this one.


So off to the vice to plane down the bottom of the trim piece a couple of passes:


And we have the right clearance:


Will try to get the weekend's work up tomorrow, which features a little bit more of my shop helper. And maybe a short discourse on sharpening plane blades, since I did that this evening as well.

[mound]

This is fantastic! I too am soon to embark on a desk project for, and with, my 11yr old son.  Can't wait to see the finished product!

[JohnnyEgo]

One of several lessons I tried to impart to my son on this project is working within a budget. And while I secretly blew through that budget when I swapped out half the sheet of Ecuadorian Sandeply for a half sheet of Baltic Birch, he doesn't know that. Which brings us to today's post about improvising. We had talked about putting wheels on the desk, but that would cost an additional $20 on top of his $120 budget. He has a little cash savings that he has been building up to buy the new Pokemon game. So I told him if he really wanted the wheels, he could come off his own savings for them. In life, when you go over budget on a job or a contract, it often comes out of your end. He thought about it, and decided he'd rather have the game now than the wheels now. Fair enough. Enter the 'free' 2x4 from the wood pile

Cut into four pieces, planed and jointed, and glued together into two pieces:


Gave each piece a 15 degree bevel on the ends:


Marked them to round the corners with the belt sander:



Finish with a mild round-over, and we have two 'free' table legs:


Then we have final trim. Ripped one of the 1/2s into a couple lengths of 5/8" strips.


Fit them to the table top as with the drawer trim:



Wouldn't normally go with 5/8" edge banding, but the extra thickness lets me put down a kid-friendly corner radius on the top:

[JohnnyEgo]

Finally wrapped up construction and mock assembly today. Next comes fill and paint, but it's probably going to wait a bit until it warms up from 20 degrees and snowing. I can get my garage up to about 60 degrees with electric heaters, but it takes a while for the finish to dry in the cold. Better off to wait a few days until the outside temperature warms up, than to try and force it in the cold.

The veneer on this ply is paper thin. To minimize the risk of my son sanding through it, I drew light pencil lines across it and told him to move on the moment they were erased.



He had a pretty good eye for the high spots.


And final mock assembly:



Overall, looks like a desk, works like a desk, and taught some important lessons on budgeting, measuring, and calculating areas in the process. It was simple and fairly fast to knock out, while still being within my boy's skill level such that he really could feel like a part of the process. I am pretty happy with this. Will post a few final pictures when we get around to paint and assembly after the holiday.