Glacial Progress on My Desk

Glacial Progress on My Desk

Hank Knight

As we've discussed in several contemporary posts, I'm building a slant top desk. My landlady during college had a magnificent Kentucky walnut slant top desk that had belonged to her grandfather when he was president of Centre College in Danville Ky where I and the rest of my family went to school. I was enamored with her desk and I've wanted one ever since. Since I retired from practicing law 5 years ago, I haven't had a desk of my own. My wife runs me out of her study every time I sneek in there to use her desk (she taught college English Lit for 30 years before she retired and her study is sacrosanct). Finally I decided to build my own desk. Naturally I chose the walnut slant top that has been rolling around in my memory for 50 years. I studied up on slant tops and looked at hundreds of examples. I decided I could design my own, combining features I liked from other examples and from what I remembered of the desk of my college days.

The first big hurdle was French Feet. The desk has French feet. We have an antique Kentucky cherry five-drawer chest with French feet we bought back in the day. I love it, but I've never been able to figure out how the feet were constructed. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Bill Tindall, who rescued me from my fruitless wanderings through French furniture architecture and taught me how to construct French feet. Thanks Bill. I am forever in your debt for this.

Seeing it done and having it explained in wonderful detail is not the same as doing it. I have drawn detail diagrams of the foot construction and incorporated them into full scale plans for my desk. all that's left to do is execute the plan. I bought some beautiful 5/4 figured walnut from Hearne Hardwoods last Fall and was able to acquire another 100 BF of walnut from a friend. From this stash I selected nice straight grained boards and glued up the sides panels for my desk. So far so good.

Next came cutting the dados and sliding dovetails for the drawer blades and the top and writing surface. As I've previously mentioned in other posts, all went well until the last dovetail socket. I neglected to lock the depth adjustment on my router and totally botched the cut. It was a full 3/16" deeper at the back than at the front. I was mortified and discouraged, coming to grips with the thought of wasting a bunch of my best walnut on a botched side panel. But Derek Cohen came to my rescue with his post about his recovery from a similar error on his apothecary chest. I nerved it up and made a good recovery by filling in the miss-cut female dovetail channel and recutting it. It looks as good and new. Whew!

Emboldened, I decided to tackle the French feet. The first big hurdle involved making a deep saw cut (2 1/2" deep) about 3/32" form the outside edge of the bottoms of each of the side panels. The saw kerf allows for a curved wedge to be driven into the side panel and glued and clamped in place to create the graceful curve of the French foot. Here's a diagram and my practice piece Bill supervised:

[url=https://flic.kr/p/HYspc2][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/HYspc2]IMG_3901[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/158680038@N03/]Hank Knight[/url], on Flickr

The idea of running a 4 foot tall 2 foot wide panel vertically through my table saw where there is almost zero tolerance for error was intimidating. I decided to construct a sled using some old oak 90 degree brackets my father had made years ago. It worked like a charm:

[url=https://flic.kr/p/24SHzWC][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/24SHzWC]IMG_3898[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/158680038@N03/]Hank Knight[/url], on Flickr

I'm exhilarated! And ready for the next step. I have been fretting over repairing my messed up dovetail channel and cutting the deep saw kerf for the French feet for a couple of months. Now that those are successfully behind me, I'm looking forward to moving on with this project. Maybe I'll have an actual desk to show for my efforts at the end.