When you start working in the world of furniture that folds and unfolds, it’s easy to get your frontal lobe into a blender. Even though you know that this contraption should work, you don’t actually believe it until you build it.
With this folding officer’s desk, I had six butt hinges all turning in different directions. So keeping inside and outside all straight as I screwed them in kept me flummoxed. And I kept wondering how much spacing I should leave between the folding aprons and the inside of the legs (my experiments with the mechanism told me the answer was “none”).
But still you worry.
So it was satisfying for the table base to snap open and shut perfectly on the first try.
Now I just need to build the folding desktop, which locks the base in the open position. I’d better get the jack plane sharpened up – the top is 24” wide, and I have only a 13” surface planer.
— Christopher Schwarz
