Computer Desk Extension

We have a bedroom in our house that we use as an office/guitar room/junk storage room.  I'm going to be doing a few articles on organization and storage type projects in this room, and this time around it's focused on my computer desk.  In this room I keep my computer on a desk that is not designed to be a computer desk.  It's just a general purpose desk from before the days of computers.  Because of this, and because I am generally a hoarder and slob, my computer desk is overflowing with too much stuff.  It's just not big enough to hold both my computer equipment and all the other junk that I leave laying around on it.

I decided to build a little extension wing off the left hand side to accommodate a larger printer, and hopefully just free up some more space to hold my junk!

This extension is supported by some mortise and tenon shelf brackets.  You may recognize this design from several of my previous articles.  These are simple to build, and strong enough for any normal duty load situation.  I made these out of some scrap spruce I had lying around.  I started by laying out the shape on some scrap.

Then I cut a notch out of the top corner of the horizontal piece of the bracket because I needed the top of the horizontal piece to sit nearly flush with the top of the vertical piece.  This meant that the tenon portion of the horizontal piece needed to be shorter than the overall width of the horizontal piece.

With the notch completed, I bored a series of overlapping holes in the vertical portions of the brackets to form through-mortises.  Then I cleaned up the sides of the mortises with a file.

I rounded the ends of the tenons with a file to match the mortises.  I go back and forth on this - sometimes I round the mortise, sometimes I square the tenon.

I drilled some pocket holes to mount the table later, and glued up the brackets.

The actual table portion is also made from scrap spruce.  It's composed of 5 spruce boards of different widths glued up to make a wider panel.  I edge jointed these pieces on the jointer and then glued up the panel.

Once the panel is dry, I scrape off the excess glue.  I need to establish a straight edge on one of the end grain sides of the panel, but it's too big for my table saw sled.  So I attach a straight piece of wood temporarily with double sided tape.  This straight piece then rides against the table saw fence while I cut the opposite end grain side parallel.  Then I can run this newly cut side against the fence with the temporary piece removed to cut the original side straight.  I also cut the side grain sides down to the right width.

Once these cuts have been made, I flatten the panel with a hand plane.  It's too big to go in my planer, and honestly I enjoy using hand planes for jobs like this that aren't too big.  If you don't have any hand planes, I really recommend you buy a used Stanley no 5 off ebay.  You can pretty reliably get one for less than 50 bucks, and if you're willing to do some limited restoration work yourself, you can often find a somewhat rusty one in need of some TLC for much less.  Try to find one made before World War 2 if possible, but honestly my most used jack plane is a cheap knock-off of unknown age so you really can't go that wrong.  There is an excellent index of Stanley plane information here, for those interested.

The existing desk top has a profile routed around its edges. 

This allows the top to be nearly 3/4 of an inch thick at its core, for strength, but only appear about 1/2 inch thick at the edges to make it lighter looking.  I certainly don't have whatever custom router bit produced this really shallow ogee in some factory, so I do the best approximation I can with my tablesaw.  I wanted to replace the concave curve of the ogee with just a straight taper cut, but I didn't want to take the time to build a jig like this.  So I just stuck a spacer piece on the board to run against the fence to make the board pass by the blade at an angle.  If you are going to make this sort of thing very often at all, I'd recommend building a jig, but this worked fine for this one small project. 

The fillet of the profile is made by making a normal rip cut with the blade only extended about 1/8 of an inch.

Then I rounded over the top edge with a router bit, but I couldn't figure out a way to get the router bit to cut the bottom edge with the taper, so I just rounded it over with my block plane.  Incidentally, this is the the second plane I'd really recommend you buy.  You can find them used on ebay, or even pretty cheaply new as well.  Here's what I came up with.  It differs from the original in that the fillet is taller, and the space between the fillet and roundover is a taper instead of a concave curve.  But it's close enough for me.

I wanted to attempt to somewhat color match this extension wing with the existing desk finish, so I sanded everything down and stained it with some golden pecan stain.  The spruce always ends up looking sort of splotchy when using these oil based stains, but I just do the best I can.  The color match is really not that good, but it's better than if I hadn't stained it at all.  I sprayed on several coats of rattle-can lacquer as a topcoat, and after it cured out I mounted it to the desk with drywall screws.  I did some very out of character straighting for the last picture to show the setup at its best.