Maple Desk Hutch

When it comes to wood­work­ing projects, I sup­pose my daugh­ter is my num­ber one cus­tomer. At least, she asks me to make her the most projects and they tend to be very spe­cif­ic requests. So when she asked about get­ting a hutch/shelf for her fair small IKEA desk, I fig­ured she might find some match­ing IKEA piece. How­ev­er, she had in mind some­thing a bit more high-end. She found a sol­id maple top shelf from Grove­made that cost $300. Mind you, it’s prob­a­bly a rea­son­able price for qual­i­ty, hand­made goods. But I fig­ured I could make her one.

She sketched out the dimen­sions she want­ed and then I refined the design a bit based on what was pos­si­ble. We even went to Wood­craft togeth­er to pick out a nice maple board! It was about a 6“x1” board with some nice grain pat­terns and fair­ly flat. I ran it through the pla­nar to clean it up on the top & bot­tom faces. I used my router table with a spi­ral down-cut, flush-trim bit to joint an edge. I could then clean up the oth­er edge using the table saw.

I used my bis­cuit join­er to cut slots for align­ment bis­cuits on both the new­ly cleaned edges. The glue does all of the struc­tur­al work in the joint. These bis­cuits are real­ly just there to help keep the faces flush dur­ing assem­bly. The legs were sim­i­lar­ly glued up so as to have the grain run­ning up/down the leg rather than show­ing the end-grain on the front side. How­ev­er, they were small enough to just clamp togeth­er with­in the need of biscuits.

I knew I want­ed to have a cham­fered edge to give the over­all piece a slim­mer appear­ance. The ref­er­ence piece appears to have 45° edges, but I want­ed a small edge with a steep­er cham­fer below. So I pur­chased the cheap­est 60° cham­fer router bit I could find. These can be very pricey and I was­n’t sure I’d have a use for it after this project any­way. I sup­pose I could get away with using this a few more times, but I don’t think it would stay sharp for long. And hon­est­ly, using that large of a bit in my router was more than a lit­tle ter­ri­fy­ing. For­tu­nate­ly, this maple cut very eas­i­ly even with the cheap bit. I man­aged to not take any pho­tos of that process, though (prob­a­bly too busy fear­ing for my safety!).

The far eas­i­er (and less ter­ri­fy­ing) router process was cut­ting some “blind” slots in the legs. I do hap­pen to have some “under­sized” straight router bits which are the com­mon thick­ness for ply­wood. So I could start the cut by drop­ping the leg piece down on the bit and then push­ing it on through. Com­bined with a notch in the cor­ner of the shelf, this makes for an “invis­i­ble” sup­port slot once assem­bled. The shelf is made from 1/4″ ply­wood (which, in case you did­n’t know, is actu­al­ly 7/32″ thick), which was the only part which was­n’t sol­id maple. How­ev­er, I did man­age to use some of the thin rip off cuts from the joint­ing process to glue on a sol­id edge to the shelf.

Now, wood­work­ing purists should prob­a­bly just stop read­ing here. Why? because I just used pock­et holes to attach the legs to the top. I had con­sid­ered using some thread­ed inserts and long bolts (as I did with the cen­ter shelf sup­port), but they would have just inter­fered with the slot I had already cut. So, in the inter­est of keep­ing things sim­ple, I just used pock­et holes. They’re not vis­i­ble at all when this is being used and allowed me to dis­as­sem­ble the piece for finishing.

The cen­ter sup­port is real­ly just glued up from a lot of scrap off-cuts. I notched out the front of the shelf there as well to accom­mo­date a slight­ly longer front edge just for some visu­al inter­est. This sup­port is attached with some 2–1/2″ long machine screws into some brass thread­ed inserts. Those were fair­ly easy to install but drilling out the hole for these proved to be very tough as the brad-point bit poked through the top of the shelf on one! Ouch! I man­aged to patch up the tiny hole with some black CA glue, but worth not­ing to be very cau­tious when using these in the future.

Then came lots of sand­ing and fin­ish­ing. I used Total Boat brand Hal­cy­on again, as it’s just very for­giv­ing. I put four coats on all the pieces and sand­ed it with 400 grit after the last coat. I even took a very fine fin­ish pad to the top shelf sur­face to give it a real­ly nice feel. I cut some strips of shelf lin­er and glued those to the bot­toms of the legs using some spray adhe­sive. These will serve as both padding and to pre­vent the shelf from slid­ing around. Of course, I had to add my Cicero Craft­ed stamp to the fin­ished piece once it was complete!

I have to say that the few projects where I’ve tak­en a rough-sawn piece of wood and then milled it and shaped it into a final piece like this have been real­ly excit­ing. There is just this real­ly great feel­ing at see­ing a piece of that rough lum­ber next to this fin­ished piece. Know­ing that there was a nice piece of fur­ni­ture or frame in there and I found it and made it real is awesome.