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I started building a desk for my son, David, just after Christmas in 2005. I bought the rough-sawn cherry
wood from Collector’s Specialty Woods in southern Colorado,
as well as the hackberry Here is David with the desk in his room. We put protective glass top on the desk. The next picture is of some of the rough-sawn lumber in my workshop. This wood is 4/4 thickness and was used for the top, panels, and drawer fronts. The next shot is of some of the lumber used for the legs of the desk. It is being cut to length with a crosscut saw (Disston #12. It will then be cut to width with a rip saw to form the basic leg.
After cutting the legs to rough size, they were planed to square at the top and inside tapers toward the bottom.
The legs were made to join to the desk with “triple miter” joints. This joint uses a mortise and tenon with a mitered fit of the frame of the desk into the leg. Here I am cutting the mitered joint for the lower part of the desk frame. The frame has tenons that are mortised into the legs. Here I am chopping the mortise into one of the lower miters of a leg.
You can see the completed mortises and mitered joints of the lower joint. The top of the leg is mitered and I have just started chopping the mortise into the top of the leg. The top of the desk is composed of three panels. These panels float in the frame of the top. I used my best smoothing planes to get the best finish possible on the top panels. Here is one of the top panels being planed flat and smooth.
The previous photo is of one of the side panels. The central panel is larger and composed of two pieces of wood glued into a wide panel with grain matching at the joint. A tongue was planed onto the edge of each panel and a frame was built to hold the panels. This frame has a groove around the inside edge to mate with the panel tongues. There are floating tenons at the corners of the frame and the center dividers of the frame are attached to the long rails with mortise and tenon joints. Here are a couple of pictures of the frame and panels of the top being glued together.
The bottom side of the top is up in these pictures. The panels were finished with shellac before assembly to make sure that they would have finish all over to inhibit moisture transfer in the wood. When I test assembled the top and centered the panels, I drilled holes in the frame and into the edge of the panels so that they could be repositioned at the center locations when gluing the top. You can see a dowel in one of the holes in the lower left corner of the previous picture. The sides and back of the desk have floating raised panels. Here are some pictures of planning the raised panels.
First a narrow groove is plowed on the inside edge of the raised portion of the panel. Then the edge of the panel is planed down to the level of this groove. Finally the edge is beveled to a consistent thickness at the edge. This edge will fit into a groove in the frame. Here are some of the planes I used to shape the panels. The frame had to be grooved to accept the panels. The longer stretches of these grooves could be plowed with a plane. The shorter parts, such as on the legs, had to be chiseled.
Here a plow plane is being used to plow a groove in a long section of the frame. The frame of the desk was constructed using the triple miter joints into the legs and double mortise and tenon joints to connect the vertical drawer dividers into the top of the frame and dovetails to connect the bottom of the frame. Here is a picture of the double tenons being cut at the top of the vertical part of the frame. The groove on the left side of the piece is to hold an interior panel of the desk.
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wood that is used for the drawers. All of the work on
this desk was done with hand tools. No power tools
were used. 
