Wall Desk – Part 1, Design – Model 1

A multi-post series about designing and making a custom desk.

Desk Material

Considering it’s high cost it seems natural to spend a little time to emphasize the wood used in building this desk.  The first thing that was specified by my customer was that they wanted the desk to be made out of cocobolo. I said “ok, are you sure?” They said “Yes!” I said “awesome, that is going to be very heavy and expensive”, once again they said “Yes!”  Okee dokee.

We went to the toy stores and purchased enough material for the desk surface to start with.

• Cocobolo for the main section, Gaboon Ebony for the breadboard ends
• (2) Planks of cocobolo roughly 6′ long by 7″ wide by 1″ (4/4) thick
• (1) Stick of gaboon ebony, 2.5″ x 2″ x 50″

Design

Since this was going to be an expensive proposition for my customer I wanted to make models to help with determining the final design. This would allow the customer to understand the concept of the design and allow for changes in the design which would keep the overall cost down.

The first design was based on input from my customer. He wanted a desk that folded up and slid up the wall into a frame. The desk was to have legs attached with hinges so they would fold up behind the desk surface in the wall frame.  Since the desk was to be located very close to a doorway he didn’t want it to protrude too far out from the wall which left us with roughly 2.25 inches to work with for the total thickness from the wall where the desk would be attached out to the doorway space. This was going to be a tight fit for a desk surface, legs and pivoting space all inside the confines of the wall frame.

Model 1

The purpose of the model was to prove the concept of a desk surface with attached legs sliding up into a frame on the wall. Emphasis on the sliding-up part. Turns out that most wall mounted desks fold down from the wall…..

The first model was a simple afair constructed with scrap pieces from my workshop.I made a simple desk surface out of a piece of plywood. Then I started on the wall frame.  Since the desk surface needed to slide up the wall I need some type of roller assembly to attach to the desk and a track of some kind to attach to the insides of the wall framet. Simple enough… not!

Went to the local family-owned hardware store to find some roller/track assemblies. Turns out if you don’t need the desk to pivot out (which is what makes it a desk) then there are tons of options from cheap drawer slides to industrial strength hardware. Well great, however since this is to be a desk I need something to pivot on and something to slide up into. So I settled on a cheap set of rollers with a stud that could be inserted into a hole on the edges of the desk. For the track assembly I couldn’t find anything remotely like what I needed that was also cheap… remember this is just a model. So I had to actually use my woodworking skills and cut a groove large enough for the rollers into the sides of the wall frame.

Proof of concept

In the end a model was constructed and it proved that I could potentially make a desk that folds-up and slides-up into a wall frame.  Model 1 ended up being approx 20” tall by 10” wide. However, I had some nagging concerns:

• This was going to be very heavy (the planks weighed approx 80 lbs before milling to size)
• You had to lift the desk, fold up the legs and then slide the whole thing up a wall
• The legs were on hinges which means that the whole desk surface was unstable, not that it would collapse but just that it would move every time you touched it
• The legs would need some kind of bracing to keep them in place which mean’t that the design just wasn’t going to be as elegant as I was hoping for… but I was trying to accomplish what my customer wanted.

My customer liked the concept, however, I wasn’t convinced that I was going to be able to build a desk that was worth the cost of the material and something they would be extremely happy with.  I decided that I needed to build a second model closer to life size so that I would know exactly what hardware was available, how well the rollers engaged the track, sort out the final dimensions, ease of use, and last but certainly not least – how it would look!

Stay tuned, installment 2 coming soon.

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