12MM dominos Strong enough for this?.....

[estley]

I'm about to start building a cantilevered table, much like the one Matthias Wandel built a few months ago. He used one of his jigs to make finger joints on the upright-to-horizontal joints. I'm wondering if a couple of 12mm dominos per joint will do the trick.

 

[semenza]

I think it would work fine.  Dominos glued into the mortises and pieces glued together. It will be very strong.  Try a test on some similar length scrap. Attach bottom end of the 'L' solidly to something.......  see if you can break it apart by leaning / pushing on it.

Seth

 

[estley]

yeah, as soon as I hit "publish" (or post, or whatever it is), I thought why not just mock something up with a 2X4 and see how much it takes to break it....

 

[Billedis]

I saw a similar desk on Jord's Workshop about a week ago and he used domino's for the joinery, but I am not sure the size.  You can check him out on YouTube.  Bill

 

[Birdhunter]

The design of the desk looks fundamentally vulnerable to failing at the joints if undue pressure is applied to the user side..... some adult sits on the edge. The failure mode would be independent of using Dominos or any othe joint technique. Otherwise, I think Dominos would work.

 

[Svar]

I would do
a) lap joint with some perpendicular pins/dowels, or
b) miter joint with large spline 1/2 thickness of the material.
You need to plan that the table might not only hold a laptop, eventually someone will sit on it as Birdhunter pointed.
Not sure I would trust 12 mm dominos in this situation.

 

[bkharman]

Why not add steel?  You could leave the top off and weld some steel together to make an "L" to slip down in the verticals piece that the other part goes in the arms under the desk top. Could do the same thing for the legs.

If you never leaned on the desk, the 12s would be fine... I would hate to test it under load!

Cheers. Bryan.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Bob D.]

"a) lap joint with some perpendicular pins/dowels,"

I was thinking the same thing. Then I read bkharman's suggestion about using steel, and thought why not use both!

Build as per the original design but route a 3/4" dia. x 1" deep groove on the inside face of each leg into which you could fit a 3/4" steel rod bent to fit. Then cover that with a piece of 1/4" x 3/4" wide wood in a contrasting color (walnut maybe with a birch frame). You would have the strength of the steel and the beauty of the wood and the rod would be covered in what appears to be merely a decorative inlay of contrasting wood.

 

[Svar]

Another alternative is dovetail like this:http://jrusten.com/category/chairs/

 

[estley]

The design of the desk looks fundamentally vulnerable to failing at the joints if undue pressure is applied to the user side..... some adult sits on the edge. The failure mode would be independent of using Dominos or any othe joint technique. Otherwise, I think Dominos would work.

my desk is a L configuration, right now it's one big L. But I'm looking to switch to a adjustable height for the long segment where my monitors/keyboard are. The small side of the L is where I keep my printer, hard drives and misc crap, it never really gets "loaded", at most I use my laptop on that side sporadically.

Originally I was going to do an A-frame, but I realized that I would constantly hit my leg, or hit it with my chair, that's the need for a C frame.

 

[r_e_endymion]

You can take a look a the video that Jordan has done with a similar desk design and eventually hask him the question on the domino size.


To add strength, you can also lock the dominos with some dowels (drawboring technique)

 

[glass1]

if the horizontals run over the verticals a couple of pocket screws on the inside of the desk could help. Go for it. Discount the negative folks. Experiment ! Cantilever is beautiful.