Introduction: Industrial-style Metal and Timber Study Desk
As I've covered here, I've been remodeling my room, which was to be many things, but primarily a work room / home office.
I also wanted to build all the furniture for the room, and the work desk was to be the centre piece.
In this instructable, I'll take you through the process of building that desk, step by step. I'll show you what I did and in some cases present alternative options to make things simpler.
Supplies
As you'll see below, I used recycled timber.
You can do the same or you can buy timber boards you'll use for the glue-up. Or, you could buy a complete table top, either from a hardware store or from a local woodworker.
The dimensions depend on the size of the desk you'll be making. Mine was 2000x750x30mm, so I'll base everything off of that.
Desk top
- Timber boards, 8x 100x2000x30mm (I used Australian Red Gum) [~4"x6'7"x1.2"]
Cabinets
- ~16m [52'6"] of 30x30x3mm [1.2"x1.2"x0.12"] angle (L-shape) steel
- ~10m [32'10"] of 30x3mm [1.2"x0.12"] flat bar
- ~1m [3'] of 30mm [1.2"] round bar
- 1 full sheet (2400x1200mm, 7'10.5"x3'11.25") of 1.2mm [0.05"] hot-rolled steel
- ~2.5m [8'3"] of 100x5mm [4"x0.2"] flat bar
- ~400 round-head, M6 screws (length isn't crucial, the shorter the better; you may use more or less depending on how you want your cabinets to look)
- 8x 40cm [1'3.75"] drawer runners (you can use different kinds; I used soft-close ball-bearing runners)
Drawers
- Timber boards for the fronts: ~5m [16'5"] x 100x20mm [4"x0.8"]. Specific lengths are not that important, just the overall amount of material. You'll need 380mm [1'3"] lengths for the drawers. Also the width isn't that important here; if they are wider you can rip them to width, and if they are more narrow you can glue them up, as long as you've got enough material. 5m is based on 100mm width.
- Timber boards or plywood for the drawer boxes. I used timber boards for the sides, and plywood for the bottom.
The size of the boxes is somewhat flexible - it depends on the length of your drawer runners (my drawers don't go all the way to the back of the cabinets), and the height of the boxes can be anywhere from flat (just the bottom) to 100mm [4"] (height of the drawer front).
Keep in mind that your runners determine the width of the drawer boxes (the box width is width of the cabinet - 2x thickness of a runner).
- For small drawers (x6) I used:
- 2x 445x80x19mm [1'5.5"x3.15"x0.75"] for the long sides
- 2x 312x80x19mm [1'0.25"x3.15"x0.75"] for the short sides
- 1x 445x350x12mm [1'5.5"x1'1.75"x0.47"] for the bottom
- For large drawers (x2) I used:
- 2x 445x190x19mm [1'5.5"x7.48"x0.75"] for the long sides
- 2x 312x190x19mm [1'0.25"x7.48"x0.75"] for the short sides
- 1x 445x350x12mm [1'5.5"x1'1.75"x0.47"] for the bottom
- Offcuts of the angle steel for handles
- ~1m [3'] of 6mm [0.24"] round bar
Finish
For the desk top, I used a hardwax oil. This looks very similar to my combination of oil and wax, but is chemically altered to make the oils harden better so it's more durable. My favourite is the one by Whittle Waxes, but most brands I've tried work well. You can use something similar or you can use a film finish like a polyurethane varnish for more durability.
For blackening the metal, I used a blackening solution (https://jaxchemical.com/shop/jax-iron-steel-nickel-blackener/) - To protect the metail and for the drawer fronts, I used a home-made mixture of mineral turpentine, boiled linseed oil, beeswax and carnauba wax (4 : 2 : 1 : 0.2). You could use a metal clear coat instead for the metal, and the same finish for the drawer fronts that you used for the desk top.
Supplies and tools
Welding tools and supplies for mild steel welding.
I used:
- MIG welder
- metal band saw
- drill press
- angle grinder with assortment of cutting and sanding discs
- wire brush
- a bunch of clamps
You could use a stick or TIG welder instead, and most (all?) parts could be screwed together instead if you wanted to avoid welding.
A band saw (or other metal saw) is nice but not necessary; you could cut all the parts with an angle grinder.
Drill press will make it easier to make the many holes and to make the holes straight. But, you could also get away without it.
For timber, the tools you'll need depend on how far you want to take machining your own timber. You could buy a pre-made table top and pre-cut boards for your drawers. Then glue everything together without using many tools.
I recycled everything from old timber. I used:
- table saw
- jointer
- thicknesser
- random orbital sander
- chop saw
- drill
If you buy machined timber, you might only need a way to cut the timber to length (a hand saw, a chop saw, or circular saw...).
Phew, that's quite a list! It's a big project and has a fair number of components. But if you break it down, nothing is particularly complicated. You can work around anything you might not have available.
Please note that while I've tried to give accurate measurements here, you'll need to work with the materials you've got. Measure and adjust accordingly. Measure, measure, measure before cutting anything :)
Step 1: Design
I spent several days looking for inspiration and sketching different
designs.
Finally, I came up with something I was happy with and felt would fit into the room and the style I was trying to achieve.
Each time I'd make a sketch I thought could work, I designed it in Fusion 360.
I always do this to better visualise what I'm building. I'm terrible at sketching, and a 3d model helps me get measurements and avoid mistakes.
You can see my first few attempts above. I wanted something that dominates the space. Something that looks like it's from another time (the whole room is somewhat like that). Those versions didn't convey that feeling to me. I finally came up with the final one (I hope you can recognise it from the photo at the top of the instructable!).
Step 2: Desk Top
When building a desk, I like to start with the top. It's the part you see the most. Although usually not the most unique part of a desk or table, it's the one that provides function.
Note: if you're buying a pre-made top or getting someone to make it for you, you can skip this part. Except finishing if you're getting an unfinished top.
Materials
I used Australian Red Gum timber I found in a local ad. Someone was renovating their house and removed this massive, thick bar made of red gum. They would have thrown it away or cut it for firewood, and were happy to see it get a new life.
The timber was sitting in my garage for over a year waiting for the perfect project. I deemed it too valuable for most projects I worked on - but the day finally came.
Machining
The main challenge was machining such large pieces of timber. The bar was biscuit-glued piece made of very wide boards, each over 25cm. This is also extremely heavy timber (~1000kg/m3) so most of my machines struggled with it. So did I flipping and pushing it around.
First, I cut the boards to a length a bit over the length of the top.
Then, I ripped the boards to manageable width, around 12cm. With this, I was able to proceed to the jointer. My jointer is 20cm wide, but I was able to use more of the timber by ripping it into 2x12cm than I would get from 20cm boards.
After getting a face flat on the jointer, I jointed one edge. This gives a flat and square base to start from.
Next, I flattened the other face on the thicknesser. This timber started out at around 45mm thickness. After sitting in my garage for almost a year though, the boards bowed quite a bit. I was left with about 32mm.
This is because the bar was thickly varnished on one side, but left unfinished on the other. This makes the timber absorb a lot more moisture on the unfinished side, causing the bow. Also my garage can have large fluctuations in humidity.
Finally, to get the fourth side parallel and straight, I ripped the boards to final width. They were a little over 11cm.
Glue-up
For gluing up a large top like this, it's important to have a stable surface to glue it on, and to have enough clamps.
I lined up the boards as I wanted them arranged in the final top, trying to create the most interesting grain pattern.
I laid all boards on the clamps that would sit on the bottom, then applied glue to one edge of each joint. I then pressed them together, and applied pressure with clamps. To keep the boards in line, I used cauls . These are flat boards that lie across the top on each end, and are tightened to the top with small clamps. This is to prevent the table boards from going up and down and requiring a lot of sanding.
Sanding
However, with boards this heavy and my jointer being slightly out of alignment, I still ended with valleys and peaks in the table which required a lot of sanding.
I used a large assortment of tools - planes, chisels, power sanders, cabinet scrapers as well as a lot of hand sanding. It took a very long time but that's what you get when you don't prepare well (i.e. tune your machines)!
I sanded with grit 80, 120, 180 and then 220. I wanted a very smooth surface because I was finishing it with oil. If I was going with polyurethane, 120 would be enough because the film it creates smooths it out.
Finishing
As I mentioned, I used hardward oil as the finish. This is a blend of oils and waxes. It dries faster and offers more moisture protection than un-processed oils or waxes, while still leaving a natural finish. It also preserves the texture and feel of the wood, unlike film finishes like varnishes or epoxy. Another reason it's great is because you can touch it up by applying a bit more in a damaged spot. You can't do that with varnish because layers don't melt into each other.
Hardwax oil doesn't provide as much protection though. Choose based on how you'll use your desk (or who will be using it).
Hardwax oils are very easy to apply. The particular one I was using this time is approx. the viscosity of linseed oil, so it was easy to brush it on.
The process is: apply the oil liberally, leave it to dry for about half an hour, and then rub off any excess with a rag.
Before wiping it off, you shouldn't have any completely dry spots. If you do, you either didn't apply enough oil or your timber is particularly thirsty (so apply more).
The goal with this first coat is to saturate the timber with oil as much as possible, to get it to soak in.
However, you can't leave it on without wiping off the excess. The oil doesn't harden the way a varnish does. If you don't wipe it off you'll end up with a sticky surface you'll have to re-do.
I applied two coats - with about 48h between. A bit shorter would have been fine. But you can't re-apply it after a couple of hours like you can a varnish, because of how slowly it dries. Consult the directions for your particular brand of oil.
Note: beware "oils" that are actually varnishes. Common offenders are called "Danish Oil", "Tung Oil Finish", and more. Nothing wrong with them, but you are essentially applying a varnish with some extra oil mixed in. Read the ingredients to see what they are made of. They don't give the same finish as oils or waxes.
Step 3: Cabinets
These were the heart of the build and the most work.
Frames
I started out by making the frames. I used angle iron, because that made it easy to install the sides. Had I used square tubing, the cabinets would have been much heavier. It would also have been hard to weld the sheet metal sides without a lot of grinding of the welds.
When welding angle iron into a rectangular frame, you can either cut everything at 45deg, or you can cut a notch in one side so the other forms a square angle with it, which is what I did.
After you've got the front and back face, sides are butt welded; no angles or notches necessary.
Additionally, I welded a piece of flat bar across the face of each cabinet. This serves as a visual divider between the small drawers and the big one; it doesn't hold anything.
As I mentioned in the intro, I used a MIG welder which makes things a lot simpler, but any welding method will work.
After welding, I ground everything flat. I wanted the frames to look completetly flat. If that's not what you're after (and your welding skills are good), you could leave the welds visible.
Also, because I was going to use the blackening solution afterwards, I needed to grind off all the mill-scale. The blackening solution only works on clean, raw steel and applying it on top of mill-scale has no effect.
This was by far the most time-consuming part of the process. If I was doing it again, I'd try to only apply the blackening solution to the parts I had to grind after welding, not to the whole frame. I'm not sure it would look good - blackened in the corners and with mill-scale elsewhere - but it's worth trying.
The look of angle iron as it came from the shop was already perfectly fine for me, and if I could cover the shiny corners I had to grind, it would have made everything a lot easier.
Drilling holes
Because I wanted an old "chest" look for the cabinets, I was going to weld in series of round-head bolts into the frames. This ended up looking great, but I should have drilled the holes for those bolts before welding the frames together, on the drill press.
Instead, I drilled them with a hand drill after making the frames, and it was much harder this way. My drill press drills a hole in a 3mm piece of angle iron in about 15s. It takes me a couple of minutes to do the same with a hand drill.
In total, there are over 150 holes and bolts in the frames.
Cabinet sides
After I drilled the holes, it was time to attach the sides. I cut the steel sheet using a jig saw, but an angle grinder would have worked as well (and faster). Because the sides are overlapping the frame on the inside of the cabinets, they don't need to be perfectly straight or precisely cut.
My angle iron is 30mm wide, and I made my sides about 10mm wider than the opening in each direction. That gave me 5mm overlap, which was enough to weld it in, without obstructing the holes for the bolts.
The sides are much thinner than the angle iron (1.2mm vs 3mm) so make sure to adjust your welder.
Also, that is a lot of contact area. If you try welding it all around, you'll introduce a lot of heat and risk warping both your sides and the frames.
I used staggered welding. Welding 3cm or so, then leaving a space of about 10cm, etc.
Welds aren't seen and there's not much strength required here, so this isn't an issue.
The bolts
I bought galvanised bolts (I couldn't find raw steel ones). That means they wouldn't react to the blackening solution. Also, they had the manufacturer's logo embossed on the head. Because of this, I had to grind them before using.
I tried a few different methods: sanding by hand, using a bench grinder. Finally, using the angle grinder on a bunch of bolts trapped between two pieces of timber. That made it quick and easy to grind a large number of them.
Once I prepared them, I put them through the holes in the frames, and welded them. Again, almost no strength required here - just enough for them to hold in place - so I just tack welded each one. I could have used some kind of adhesive instead too.
The bolts I had were also a bit too long (I think 50mm). I couldn't find any shorter ones, so I had to cut off the excess after welding with the angle grinder.
Drawer supports
Finally, I needed to install drawer supports. Because I used angle iron for the frames, there was nothing to attach the drawer runners to. They needed to slide flush to the internal edge of the angle iron.
For this, I used some flat bar again which I installed in the exact positions where the drawer runners would go.
As you're doing this, keep in mind how your runners need to be installed, and how wide they are. Mine were a little over 30mm wide and I would weld them onto the supports.
After welding the flat bar, I also needed to grind the welds completely flat so they don't get in the way of drawers sliding.
Desk top supports
According to my design, the desk top would float about 10cm above the cabinets, on 4 holders.
This is a visual design decision. You could install it directly on top of the cabinets (just make sure your cabinets are tall enough in that case). You could also use two holders instead of four.
Using two would make things a little bit more fault-tolerant because two holders are always in line (or very close to). With four, you need to make sure they are all in the same plane. In my case, I had to use some washers to adjust the height, as you'll see later.
My supports are pieces of 50x5mm flat bar, welded onto two pieces of 100x30mm round bar each, and then welded onto cabinet tops.
For aesthetic purposes, I welded the round bar onto the flat bar and onto the cabinets all the way around. A few smaller welds would have held it without problems but wouldn't look as nice.
But, this introduced too much heat into my flat bars and they warped slightly. I only noticed later, but I should have clamped them to my welding table to avoid this.
Finishing
Once everything was welded together, I had two separate boxes, one for each cabinet. I left the sheet steel as is. It had a beautiful blue-ish, fairly uniform hue and I didn't want to touch that.
For the frames, I used the blackening solution mentioned earlier. This wasn't an ideal choice of finish. The solution I got is meant for jewelers. The way it's designed to work is for you to dip the part you want to blacken into the solution, leave it there for a few seconds and then rinse it out.
That wouldn't work for me, at least not with 500ml of the solution and two large steel cabinets. Instead, I used a brush to apply it. Even though I ground the frames to shiny raw steel, and used acetone to clean them to make sure they're free from any grease and dirt, the solution simply wouldn't react in a lot of places, or it would react in patches.
At first I was quite disappointed with that and thought I'd have to come up with another way to finish the cabinets. To make things worse, even after rinsing the reaction seemed to keep going and my cabinets were getting a yellow/green powdery rust. But, after applying some wax and oil mixture to it, it started looking really good. It wet the rust and stopped the reaction, and now it looked pretty much exactly how I wanted it: as old, industrial grimy steel.
After this desk I used the same process a few more times and it always turned out pretty good, but it depends on what you're after. An alternative would be to spray paint it, perhaps using one of the effect paints that give it some texture.
Step 4: Drawers
Fronts
For drawers, I used a combination of timbers. The fronts had to be redgum to match the top. As I didn't have much left from the bar I used for the top, I had to come up with something else.
I had some old fence posts made from redgum. I saved them thinking I'd use them for a project, though I never knew exactly for what. They had big notches and nails in them, so I'd never get long and clean boards.
Well, they were perfect for the drawer fronts. I first chopped them up into big blocks. Then I re-sawed them on the band saw to get thinner boards. Just a few mm over the thickness of the fronts, accounting for the material I'd have to take off on thicknesser and jointer.
Of course, this step is completely optional - if you have ready-made boards that makes the job easier.
After re-sawing, I jointed them to get two flat faces, then thicknessed all to the same thickness and finally ripped on the table saw to width.
For the small drawers, the width I got from the fence posts was enough so I could use a single board for each drawer. For the big drawers, I had to glue them up first. This was the same thing I did for the table top - using a few clamps and some glue.
I sanded them all up to 120 grit, and finished with my combination of wax and oil. I didn't use hardwax oil here because the drawer fronts would get a lot less wear than the table top. They look very much the same though, as they're both finished with oils, so the finish just looks natural.
Boxes
Boxes needed a lot of timber. It's six small drawers and two large ones. I didn't have enough redgum anymore (and this was during the lockdown so getting more wasn't really an option), so I used some old pine shelving for the drawer sides.
These were very wide (about 30cm) pine boards that were quite old and fairly warped and bowed. Although 30cm boards are nice, getting anything longer than about 50cm out of these ones was impossible at that width.
So I cut them up and machined them the same way as all other recycled timber - jointer, thicknesser, table saw. Their original thickness was 19mm, and I got 12mm out after flattening them - perfect for the drawers.
To avoid doing many paneling glue-ups for the bottoms, I used 12mm plywood. It's also pine so it matches both the grain pattern and takes on stain similar to the sides.
Being made of pine, these drawers would look completely out of place in the desk, with redgum fronts and desk top, so I stained them.
I couldn't get a redgum stain, but "barn red" was close enough. When you open a drawer, if you look closely you can tell it's not made of the same timber as the front. But that's pretty common with furniture and it doesn't look wrong because the colors are similar.
After staining, I again rubbed everything with the oil and wax mix, to prevent the stain from rubbing off (and leaving my hands red).
If you used a varnish for the desk top and drawers, you could use a staining varnish for the boxes here. But since I used finishes that leave the natural texture of the timber, I needed to do the same for the drawers and use the stain here.
To put them together, I butt-glued the sides with help of a few brad nails. I used an air gun for this, but you could use a hammer or a stapler at this thickness.
To give it some rigidity, instead of gluing the bottom over the sides, I first cut rabbets in the sides on the router table (before gluing them up), into which I fit and glued the bottoms. This makes the boxes a lot stronger and it looks nicer from the profile because you don't see the sides of the plywood bottoms.
If you want to avoid making dadoes, you can make the bottom fit into the hole inside the drawer sides, and then use a few brad nails or staples to hold it in place (along with glue). This will give it a similar level or rigidity and hide the plywood sides, but the glue-up won't be as strong.
Installing
Installing drawers can be tricky because everything needs to be aligned in order for them to slide smoothly. This is especially true if your drawer fronts are flush with the frame they're sitting in (in my case, the cabinets), because even a couple of millimeters out of alignment is very visible or can make the drawers hard to close.
In this project, the first step to making sure everything is aligned correctly was when I was welding the drawer supports. Make sure they are parallel to the top and bottom of the cabinet, equal distance from the top or bottom, and parallel to each other.
The next step was welding the outside parts of the drawer runners to those supports.
I used very light tack welds here. This is important because the metal used for drawer runners is very thin and it's easy to burn through it with too much heat (i.e. long welds). If the welds have good penetration, just 2-3 tack welds on each side will be enough to hold the drawers.
Once the outside runners were welded, I attached the inner parts to the drawer boxes with only two screws, and tried sliding them in. This is the last chance you've got for fixing things; if something is a bit off you can move the attachment points for the inner runners and fix it.
After I adjusted the drawers and made sure they slide in and out without issues, I attached the fronts. To get them aligned, I used a couple of washers I attached with some painters' tape to each side of the front, and that served as my guide to where the front needs to sit.
I then glued the front of the drawer box, clamped the front board and used the air gun again with some brad nails to keep everything in place.
Nails are not necessary here, and they're not used for strength. They simply enable you to remove the clamps immediately, and glue up all the drawer fronts at once. Otherwise, you'd have to do them one by one, waiting for the glue to dry in between.
Drawer pulls
Going further along with the theme of making everything from scratch, I decided to make the drawer pulls too. I looked at what's available to buy and just didn't like the style of anything I could find. Also, everything store-bought was too uniform to fit the style of this desk.
The drawer pulls I made weren't my original idea; I saw someone do something similar and really liked it. It's basically just two pieces of angle iron (about 12mm long) with a piece of round bar connecting them.
First, I cut the pieces of angle iron.
Then, I drilled two holes in each - one for the screw to attach it to the drawer front, and one to put the round bar through.
I then shaped them with the angle grinder to get pointed ends. I used 6mm round bar, and the same 30x30x3mm angle iron I already had, but you could use slightly larger iron and thicker bar for more ergonomic pulls (these ones look nice but you need to pinch them to pull on the drawer).
After the ends were shaped and the round bar cut to size, I put it through the two holes and welded it in.
Again, I blackened the pulls with the blackening solution, and then rubbed them with the oil and wax mix. I also blackened the screws I'd use to attach them to the drawers.
Step 5: Installation and Conclusion
Completed, the desk is very heavy and bulky. There is no way I'd be able to meneuvre it into my room.
Luckily, with the top off, the cabinets are completely independent and easy to move around. I moved them into place, attached some soft paddings to the bottom to avoid scratching the floor, and then put the desk top over them.
I then marked where the holder holes are, and drilled some pilot holes. I mentioned earlier how my desk top holders warped a little from the heat when welding. To compensate for that and make sure my desk top is lying on a flat plane, I used some washers to make everything flush.
Finally I screwed on the top and it was done!
Funnily, although this was probably the biggest piece of furniture I've made up to that point, it took only one week. It was a week I had completely off so I spent about 6 full days, morning to evening, working on it.
For me, it was definitely worth it. I work at that desk every day and I absolutely love it.
I hope this instructable inspired you to design and build something of your own! Even things that seem daunting at first can be broken down and tackled if you approach it systemmatically and patiently. If I can do it so can you :)
Good luck!