Thanks for the kind words guys. Jim the desk was not a totally Neander undertaking, however I probably produced enough hand plane shavings during this desk project to fill up a 55 gallon drum 5 times. All the flat surfaces were refined with the use of a Lie-Nielsen #4 and the last passes to achieve the final surfaces were done with an infill plane with a 50 degreed bed angle and a .004 mouth. I straighten all the critical mating edges with a #7 Stanley jointer and then cleaned them up with one of my small infill smoothers.
The real time consuming part of this project was the reverse engineering and the multitude of templates that had to be made to create the shape of the ends of the upper case and the tambour track. Given the complex nature of the top case, one has to be careful to design things so that they can be assembled once all the parts are made and finished.
My mantra during this project was "Shavings here, shavings there, handplane shavings everywhere."
Truthfully the amount of sanding that planes saved me on this project was astounding. I only had to sand the areas refined with planes with one grit in order to have them ready for finishing. The crazy thing is, in order to get the color that I was able to achieve on this piece I actually had to take the smoothed planed surfaces and rough them back up with 150 grit sandpaper.
Ron
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