Wille's desk before
During the weekend we got a good head start on building Wille's desk. In fact it's almost finished, just some painting to do and to fit a drawer.
Because I've had quite a few questions on how to do it and as I don't think I've done a great job explaining in words I took step by step photos on how we join the MDF pieces using dowels and tenons (as I've recently learned they are called the little wood plugs and tools).
Prepare yourselves for some beige photos.
We used double thickness of MDF for parts of the desk which is why you see very chunky pieces. Here we have marked the bottom piece with x's where we want to join the other part. And yes Martin is wearing shorts in the freezing garage. I'm wearing fleece and socks...
Taping the drill bit is a good way to ensure you don't drill too deep. You want to drill to a bit more than half the length of the dowel in each piece
Drilling the x's...
Once you have drilled your holes you insert the tenons into them.
Here four holes have their four tenons.
Now you take the piece you want to join with the piece you added the tenons to and place it on top of the tenons.
At this point you want to make sure everything is exactly where you want it to be. Then you press the top against the bottom...
...and you end up with itty bitty holes in the top part.
You then drill bigger holes where the itty bitty ones are.
Now it's time to stick the dowels into the holes in the bottom part. At this point you would normally add wood glue, but because we only test assembled we waited to add the glue to when we had all the pieces up in Wille's room.
Here you get the idea. The dowels that are inserted into the bottom holes now have exact corresponding holes in the other piece.
Assemble and tadaaaa!
