The fruitless search for a decent desk - Ask and ye shall receive

Talk about just about anything else that is non-gaming here, but keep it clean
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Ziggy
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Re: The fruitless search for a decent desk - Ask and ye shall receive

Post by Ziggy »

Oh, dude, total score! Congrats!

Are the drawers on metal slides? Or wood slides? From the picture it looks like maybe wood slides. If so, you can wax the slides (the parts that make contact) to make the open/close more smoothly. And that may fix one if it's binding/racking.
opa wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 11:14 am Also, there's a triangular piece of wood at the corner of each joint. Not sure what that's called. If anyone has more woodworking knowledge, feel free to enlighten me.
I have some knowledge. Post a pic and I'll see if I know.
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opa
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Re: The fruitless search for a decent desk - Ask and ye shall receive

Post by opa »

Wooden slides for the drawers. Here's a couple of pics. Using the flash shows I need to do a deeper dusting. (I promise I'm not a slob; I literally just brought this in and only did a light dusting with a cleaner :lol:)
Image

Image
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Ziggy
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Re: The fruitless search for a decent desk - Ask and ye shall receive

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Ah, nice. Yeah, get some paraffin wax and rub it on the rails and the slots on the drawers that ride on the rails. That'll make the drawers very smooth to operate.

I think that joinery you would call rabbet and dado, as oppose to tongue and grove.

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Tongue and groove and when the joinery is on the long edges. Like paneling or flooring.

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Dovetail is actually more common to find these days for drawer construction. Given the age, this might have been handmade and that joinery might have been hand cut. Hard to say from the one pic. Dovetail is definitely a superior joinery for drawers. You can see in the pic, there's just a small bit of wood on the outside part of the dado. It's easy for that to break off. Which is typically why you try and avoid putting a dado on the edge like that, and why dovetail is superior for drawers. But if you were hand making these in a production settings, it would behoove you to to use a joinery method that's faster and easier. That's why the triangle thing is there. It's to reinforce it. If it has a proper name, I can't think of it right now. Maybe a gusset? But gluing that triangle piece in definitely helps to keep that corner strong and keep it from breaking. The proof that it did its job is that all four drawers lasted this long without any of them breaking. So if it sounds like I'm being snobby about dovetails vs rabbet/dado, I'm not. I like it!

But here's what a dovetail drawer looks like...

Image
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opa
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Re: The fruitless search for a decent desk - Ask and ye shall receive

Post by opa »

Thank you for all the info!

I did pull a couple of drawers out and there are some numbers in chalk/paint on a couple of the wood pieces. While this does seem to be a manufactured piece it is still better than the garbage I was looking at in furniture stores. One desk was over $1200 and it was mostly particle board!
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