Teak Desk

This desk will be made of shop-sawn veneers of teak and maple. The desk was sort of designed for a beautiful straight grained teak plank that had my eye for a while. It will have a stack of three drawers on the left side. I decided to curve the drawers outwards, and the back of the drawer box as well. I wanted to put a single leg on the right side, and decided to go with that idea, but to have a long horizontal foot. The apron under the desktop will be a drawer as well.

The first thing I did was sketch out my parts in chalk on the plank. Once all of that was figured out, I cut out the the sections that I was going to cut into veneers, and went ahead and resawed them just under 1/8".

The first thing I made was the drawer fronts, because that curve would be my reference for every other curve. It is laminated teak glued in a vacuum press over a curved form

After I veneered the panels for my drawer box, I had to flatten each panel. Some of the quarter sawn sections of the teak tore out, so I put my new 57 degree plane to work.

When the bottom panel was flattened, I added the front apron to is, like a huge edge banding.  I could then tennon into that piece with a peg leg. Here is the drawer fronts stacked on the apron to make sure their shapes match:

I then made a maple frame and edge banded it with teak.

Before gluing the carcase up, I put a rabbet in the top and bottom of the back edges for a back panel to go into. On the sides, I put a groove for a spline the back panel will rest on as well.

The Back panel was bent on the same form that the drawers were, so the curves match eachother. Fitting a curved back panel ended up being trickier than I thought, and it took about five hours to get a nice fit.

Checking the shoulders for gaps

Glued up:

and a little fun planing the veneers on the desktop

because the bottom of the top will only show teak under the overhangs, I put maple veneers in the middle to save my teak:

The desk will have one wide drawer to the right of the drawer box, mocking an apron. to do this, I had to make a frame for the drawers to ride on. I then splined it to the back rail, and doweled it into the drawer box and right side apron:

With the back in and top doweled on it is starting to look nice

Next was drawer time. I made some frames for the drawers to ride on, and spent a few days dovetailing away. The drawer sides and bottoms are white oak.

After a couple weeks of fitting, I got the drawers running smoothly with a nice let-go.

With some more shellac and some Macassar ebony pulls: