Plywood Desk In Progress

[To Bear Arms]

Looks pretty good for a super glue stitch! Glad it is not to bad.

Many years ago I worked in a custom cabinet shop, myself and another guy was working late on personal projects. He was building his kitchen cabinets out of ash, I was building a computer corner desk system.
When you work in a cabinet shop, you know what all the "normal sounds" all the tooling makes, like you know when you hear a kick back on a table saw, or the sound of a shaper kicking back, the sound of a blade hitting a nail or rock.

I was working on a radial arm saw and the other guy (who is 6'7") was running a 3/4" dado blade on our large 15hp table saw. He was making a valance and was dadoing the back side out.
So you drop the valance down on the dado blade, push it through, then turn the saw off before you get to the end of the board. You do this so when you look at the ends of the valance you dont see the dado cut, anyways he is dropping his ash valance board down on the dado when I heard the table saw kick, I immediately look over at him and saw him flinging his arm through the air, which included a rainbow arch of blood, (remember, this dude is 6'7" and has gorilla arms) I shut my saw off, run over to him and grab his hand to look at the damage. He had dadoed the palm of his hand off. I ran to the spray room where we had nice cotton lint less rags to shove in his wound. I ended up shoving like 4 rags in his hand, It was disgusting, just chewed up hand everywhere. The saw had chunks of meat and flesh packed all up in the dust collector, dado blade cover, everywhere!

They ended up having to fold his hand together like a taco and sew it shut, because of the amount of material he lost. He went through years of rehab and to this day is still on desk duty and does not have full use of his hand.
Anyways, super glue would not have worked for this guy.

[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: