Desk Sides Glued

For the past two Sundays, I have been putting together the two sides of the desk. We had finished creating the pieces for the sides so now it was time to put the puzzle together. It has been a very exciting two weeks. I put together one side of the desk each week.
              
This is a picture of one of the desk sides. At this point, it has not been glued. As you can see, there are many joints and sides to be fitted and glued. This process has to be done fairly quickly because of the limited drying time for the glue. For this reason, it is important to have a plan and all tools ready.


This picture was taken after the side had been glued. After gluing, the wood must be clamped together for a couple days. The clamps are twisted tightly to reduce the amount of gap space between the freshly glued pieces of wood. Dr. Huminski says that you can never have enough clamps. There are six on this piece of wood right now, but we added about three more after this picture was taken. Scrap pieces of wood are also placed between the clamps and the desk so that as they are tightened, the clamps do not leave indentions in the wood.

Biscuit Time!

So far, I have only been using a mortise and tenon joint to put together my desk. On Sunday, I learned about and used a new joint called the biscuit joint.

These are biscuits.

In a biscuit joint, you first use a biscuit machine to punch a half cresent shape into a piece of wood. 

This is me using a biscuit machine. 

This is what the half cresent holes look like. I punched these holes into the two pieces I was connecting so that when you put the pieces together, the holes line up and form an oval shaped hole.

To join the two pieces, I spread glue in one 

of the cresent shaped holes and then put 

a biscuit (the first picture) in one 

of the sides of wood. Then I spread glue over the biscuit and 

in the corresponding cresent hole and

push the two pieces together.

The two pieces come together and you have wood joined by biscuits.

Seeing Beneath the Surface

Since the pictures are suddenly working excellently, I thought I would show some from the beginning of my project. This picture was taken the first or second time I worked with Dr. Huminski. It is the planing stage. The darker piece of wood is what every piece looked like when we first picked them out. Right beside the dark piece, you can see wood that is in the process of being planed. The yellow machine in the back of the picture is the planer. We slid the wood through the planer numerous times and the saw inside of the machine slowly smoothed out the wood. The best part of this stage was watching as the rough, splintery wood turned smooth. By taking off the rough outer surface, beautiful patterns in the wood were revealed beneath.

Gluing and Clamping

Last Sunday was a day for gluing and clamping. The carcass or frame of the desk is complete and so now we are moving on to filling in the carcass. These pieces include the side and back boards, stretcher (foot rest), and desk lid and writing surface. Because some pieces need to be wider or longer than the size of our original wood, we have to glue pieces together. To do this, one must cut and plane the sides of the pieces so that they will fit together with no gaps. Then you apply the glue and clamp the pieces together to sit for a few days.