The Escritoire.

Ralph Klimek 2005

This desk was not made by me, it was a restoration project and a small spiritual quest as well . This desk was discovered on a council hard rubbish collection, looking sad and forlorn in the rain, other discarded bric-a-brac suggested to the impressionable a deceased estate's junk. I noticed that the wood was naturally dark, it was solid wood, not some rubbishy laminated chipboard. The wood was cedar! Golly ! This kind of wood and planks of the size this desk was made from are simply unobtainable today. The desk was broken and would need restoration and TLC before use. It was "antique" in some superficial way, my guess that it was made before 1950 based on materials used, but I dont truly know its age.

The desk and its construction faults intrigued me. It was a mixture of ineptitude and professional expert skill. My deduction about its origin is that it was constructed by a wood working apprentice possibly in a technical school as an exercise piece or even master piece possibly in the forties or fifties when cedar wood was still available. The use of cedar for educational use is indicated because it is so easily worked with hand tools. There were no markings, only layout lines, old graffiti and deep scratches, this desk had also clearly served time as a garage bench.

The structure of the desk had a very major defect. It is made from two very wide dowelled parallel boards. The boards would have been hand planed to mate perfectly. Over the years , perhaps even during construction, because the original wood had not been seasoned long enough, both of the boards had bowed in opposite directions resulting in a very large gap in the desks top surface and totally spoiling it. Some attempts had been made to arrest the crack caused by the bowing by a previous owner or the builder but these had obviously failed. I faced now the same problem, unless I could close up the crack or reverse the bowing this poor old desk was doomed. I can only feel for the student who built this, it must have been  a terrible disappointment as the residual and irresistable forces in these two planks slowly ruined his work, maybe even just before completion when it was too late to redo it.

Reversing the bowing was out of the question. I tried with sashcramps to force it and then bind the crack closed but the force was equivalent to several tons and nature cannot be fooled like this for long. I was forced to follow the path of treating the the crack which at it widest was nearly 4 mm, far too much for putty and anyway, filler would have looked ugly under varnish. I was not going to paint it, no way. There were remnants of putty in the crack from previous attempts to remediate this problem. Rare wood deserves to be shown. The fix was inspired by dentistry. I would recut the board in situ until both internal edges were parallel  and then with sash cramps force the halves to mate. I used a jigsaw between clamp-on guide boards to clean up the crack and then by cutting, forcing, cutting , forcing until the two edges mated perfectly. The hidden wood screws that held the structure together had to be be found and cut to permit this. The wood was used as is with its aquired bow now accounted for.

Finally I had the two surface boards mated perfectly. To be sure , the hidden undersurface has cross beams installed that are heavily screwed and glued to arrest any further tendancy to bow. The wood screws that bound the top surface to the under structure had been expertly hidden, now that they were cut and now offset by the forcing operation I had to learn how to hide new and old screw holes to give a perfect top surface. Luckily the local Bunnings sold me a plug cutter. I had a small piece of the cedar wood used in an unseen part of the desk which I used as a source of plugs. The resulting hidden holes were excellent to merely good. I nailed this piece under the desk in case some future restorer long after I  go west needs it too!

With the structure now sound and other minor structural defects made good I added a hidden mystery shelf just behind the front top surface and turned my attention to the drawers. They had originally been finished with a very high quality rare wood laminate. This had over the years blistered off, the original animal glue having decayed. The edges of the laminate had suffered physical abuse. Most of it was still serviceable. It has been originally finished in dark french polish and a hint of its beauty still remained. I routed off the damaged edges and filled the resulting gap with treated pine sticks. This gave it an interesting visual contrast. The draw handles are original, I was astounded to discover that under the years of gunge, old paint and corrosion they were solid bronze ( not brass ) and assuming you could even obtain them now they would be prohibitively costly for any new project. They polished up beautifully.

At the bottom floor facing edge, there was splintering and tearing of the wood were in the past it was dragged over carpet, I added a angled brass strip here, so now the unit rests on a brass strip and can be safely dragged over the floor without further risk of splintering. The brass bar looks good too. I should have rebated the brass angle stock in, perhaps in 10 years time it it gets to be revarnished, and by then it will get castors too.

The desk was finished in stained polyurethane varnish and has a piano grade finish as by my method outlined elsewhere. The metallic decoration in the front board is a silver plated brass tea pot stand! that I embedded into the wood. She-who-must-be-obeyed decrees that I put it in the wrong way round. Go figure.

All in all a successfull project. Some things to do better next time.  The Vermont American plug cutter has a design defect. The surface on which it rotates has a rake clearance angle of zero. This results in excessive friction causing burning on the circumference of the cut plug. I should regrind it to give it small small measure of clearance. Maybe the plug should be cut under water ? Some of the  hole plugs were very good indeed. This is a skill worth developing in the future.

I should have added castors.  The decorative front board serves to hide the secret shelf and provides bracing for the tabletop. I should have used a finer grained timber stock for this. Its a piece of mystery wood from a packing crate.  The original  was a thin cedar board, same material as the tabletop, which I used as a source of material for cutting the plugs.  Maybe, instead of forcing the original tabletop crack closed I could have made the crack regular and  inlayed a wood or brass strip. That was and still is beyond my skill.

The project time for this was about three weeks total worth of my infinitisimal allotment of personal time.