Lapdesk - my first project

[W.Lill]

I have worked on this, my first project, for several months and it has been a big learning experience, but now it is finshed and it is time to share the news.

The lap desk is based on a design in the Taunton Press book on Desks and apparently is a Shaker design - whatever that means. The design has been modified to suit a cardmaker.

The material is recycled window pelmet (Tassie Oak) and rider-mower loading ramp (the dark brown accent timber), with 6mm plywood for base and drawer bottom. Construction is a mixture of machine cut and hand cut dovetails with home made quarter round moulding trim. Finish is U'Beaut Hard Shellac.

Not only have I built something of beauty but I have also acquired some other skills from this project include buying, setting up and using a table saw, thicknesser, router table and dovetail jig, as well as making various jigs along the way including a cross-cut sled for the table saw. The greatest pleasure came from making the hand cut dovetails on the front, making and fixing the hand cut moulding, the final finishing, and playing (sorry that should be fitting things) with the little block plane.

Any suggestions on the best use for a spare drawer that don't quite fit together or a spare top with a dado cut across the middle are welcome.

My next project will be to build a workbench using north coast hardwoods.

[BobR]

Looks good to me. Sounds as though you not only had a good learning experience, but that you also had a lot of fun. Looking forward to the next project.

[zenwood]

Wow: that's an impressive first project, or 100th project, for that matter. The dovetails look great: and the whole piece looks built to last.

The Shakers were a religious sect in America that thrived during the latter 1800s, and they had a side business making furniture and other artifacts. They had a minimalist style that was in opposition to the earlier federalist and other highly decorative styles popular at the time. (The term "shaker" comes from communal ecstatic dance rituals that they performed.)

For the spare drawer and top leftovers, I suggest a couple of small boxes to hone your skills. Maybe they could serve as inserts into the laptop drawer.

What is a cardmaker, and how did you modify the design to suit one?

[jmk89]

The Shakers were a religious sect in America that thrived during the latter 1800s, and they had a side business making furniture and other artifacts. They had a minimalist style that was in opposition to the earlier federalist and other highly decorative styles popular at the time. (The term "shaker" comes from communal ecstatic dance rituals that they performed.)
The Shakers were(are) Puritan sect associated originally with the Society of Friends - Quakers. They have turned their back on modern advances (eg they still use horses and carts) and they still make furniture and other wooden objects in the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with simple lines.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia item on Shakers, if you are interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

BTW nice desk, greenie on its way. But it gives you an idea of how tough Shakers are/were if you were to put that on your lap for a long time and work on it, especially with the drawers and the storage spaces full of paper etc!

[W.Lill]

Looks good to me. Sounds as though you not only had a good learning experience, but that you also had a lot of fun. Looking forward to the next project.

Thanks for that Bob. I am certainly looking forward to the next one, the lapdesk was a challenge as I had to work out everything from scratch, but I think that the next project is bound to be a bit easier. I have found out today that I can get two packs of hardwood from Sydney terminus to Orange for around $150 so I will be busy over the next few weeks looking at old forum postings and elsewhere to get a design and method for a workbench to build with the timber.

[W.Lill]

Wow: that's an impressive first project, or 100th project, for that matter. The dovetails look great: and the whole piece looks built to last. Thank you. I certainly sweated over those dovetails, what a great way to join two bits of timber. Funny thing is that the machine cutting didn't seem to speed things up that much and at the end of it all cutting the dovetails on the front by hand was more satisfying as well as being quieter. At this stage I am likely to rely on the jig a fair bit, but can see that eventually I will move to do most dovetails by hand.


For the spare drawer and top leftovers, I suggest a couple of small boxes to hone your skills. Maybe they could serve as inserts into the laptop drawer. Good idea, I hadn't thought of that, some boxes in the drawer will be useful for holding pens, coloured pencils and other artifacts of teh cardmaker's toolkit.


What is a cardmaker, and how did you modify the design to suit one? A cardmaker is a person who makes cards (birthday, anniversary etc), in this case my Mother. The modification was to alter the dimensions so that the top could accommodate a piece of A4 paper in vertical or horizontal orientation and the drawer and top compartment would hold the existing collection of boxes of decorative paper, cutters, etc.