today i’m going to show you how i builtmy super huge, granite inlaid solid wood desk. each of these chunks right here are piecesof granite that i got for free from a counter shop that was just throwing them away. the legs are made of piping and i’ll explaina little bit more about that as well. so here’s where i’m at so far.
router inlays woodworking, i’m making a giant, 7 foot long graniteinlaid desk. i got these three quarter inch thick onesjust because it will take less wood out of the desk. i have some thicker pieces of granite, butwhen you’re taking that much wood out of
the total desk space it’s going to leaveit pretty structurally unsound. so the thinner the pieces of granite are,the more sturdy the desk will be. i have a bunch more granite slabs over there. as far as positioning of the granite goes,i have this piece right here which used to be one. i thought it would be pretty cool to spreadthem out a little bit. and then as far as the rest of them go, ikind of want to keep the same grain of the granite. even though these are entirely different,chunks that are broken off, they have that
dark streak kind of going left to right. i want to kind of keep that uniform throughoutthe table to keep a general theme of it. and then as i’m using my plunger-outer tocut out the holes. i have marked this with a pencil and i’veleft a little piece of wood right here so as i router out this space around here, thiswill keep it steady and even with the top of the table so i don’t end up with unevenchunks at the bottom, and i’ll show you what i mean later on. now all i have to do is finish routing outthe other slots for the other pieces of granite and i’ll figure out how to fill this gapbetween the granite and the wood.
i’ve started to seal the blocks down intothe wood. i’ve taken some liquid nails and some woodglue and i’ve dripped it into the hole and then set the granite slabs on top of thatto kind of seal it into the back of the wood. and then i started taking wood filler andputting it around the outside of the granite and the inside of the wood and that’s workedout pretty well so far. one thing that really helped me lay the woodfiller in-between the granite and the wood is when i started i was using my finger anda knife and putting it in-between, but it was spreading out too far in the wood andi’m afraid that’s going to look bad when i finally stain it.
so what i did is i bought one of these dollarketchup dispensers from walmart and filled it up with the wood filler, and then i cantake it and squeeze it into the crack between the granite and the wood and that makes ita lot less messy. i also tried an experiment with the liquidnails. liquid nails says it’s stainable so we’regoing to find that out. i used these two front pieces entirely withliquid nails. so i’m going to take those and sand themdown later, clean them up and then we’ll see how well they stain. what’s nice with the wood filler though,is that i can take it and it’s rough right
now, but as soon as it’s going to dry itleaves it a little bit tacky and you can just tap it down into the hole and kind of cleanup that hole a lot better than it would normally. one block left and then i’ll let it dryfor a day and then stain it and see what happens. let me talk for a minute about the base thati’m using for the desk. it is a pipe base. basically the whole thing is made out of pipes. starting with this leg here you can see thati have the base and then i have a t-joint after a 4 inch straight piece. and then that branches out.
and i’m going to link all of the differentparts of this base in the video description below. i’ll put a link there to where all the partsare. so i have this bar right here space as thetwo legs. then i have another t-joint up here that movesacross, and a t-joint here that moves up. so there are a total of 4 legs around theside that you can see here. and then there’s the one leg here, up inthe center, that goes up towards the back. that’s where my monitor stand is going tobe so this adds another little bit of support in the center of the back of the desk.
and i’ve put all of my weight on that andit even distributes it down these legs over here which is really nice. so the desk is going to be pretty darn sturdy. another thing that’s nice about the deskis that the garage floor isn’t quite even, you can see that there’s a little bit ofdiscrepancy between the concrete slabs, but at each of the joints you can see the base,the 4 inch piece and the t-joint, you can screw it in a little bit more or a littlebit less and then the top will be exactly where you want it. so i learned a couple things while stainingthe top of this desk.
a) stain does stick to granite, so i’m goingto have to find a way to get that off. after i noticed that, i did switch aroundand start taping off the pieces of granite so hopefully the rest of them won’t endup quite as marked up. now it’s all uncovered and ready to be putin the office - slash my bedroom. so i’m getting the base of the table allscrewed into place, and all of the tops are measured so they’re all the exact same height. so i’m pretty happy with how the desk turnedout. i used two different types of granite justto kind of see how they would differ. so we have the white granite in the back,and that’s just like a matte finish.
it’s not super glossy or anything, and ithink it looks alright. but i actually prefer this darker graniteright here that is super glossy. you can see the refection of the light rightthere and the door frame. so i think having a bunch of super glossypieces embedded in the wood would look really cool. the one thing that i would do differently,is i tried using liquid nails right here because it said it was stainable. it actually did not stain very well and idon’t like how it looks. i mean it’s not terrible, but where i usedthe wood filler it blends in a lot easier
with the granite. so next time i will use wood filler for allof the granite pieces instead of liquid nails. so what’s fun about this set up is i havemy new desk here and i have my old desk here. and if you remember, this is the one i didthe wireless charging through the bottom of i’ll post a link for that video here aswell. and so since it’s right next to my bed ican just take my phone, put it right on my desk and have it wirelessly charge throughthe desk during the night. this is also where i do all my phone repairvideos as well. i’ll set up my light box and my camera mountand tripod here so i can film those videos
right next to my editing station. so this is it. and as you can tell it’s pretty darn sturdy. [clap] thanks a ton for watching. if you have any questions, make sure to leavethem down in the comments below. don’t forget to “like†if you enjoyedthis project and don’t forget to subscribe. thanks for watching!
