# New In woodworking. First Project: Music Studio Desk



## dcuchillas (Mar 13, 2014)

Hello, I've been browsing the forum a little, and you are very informative.

I've always wanted to build a desk for my home studio, but never took the shot.

Now I am willing to do it...but: let's start by saying that I don't have much experience in this kind of work, I can drill, screw, stuff like that, but have never done wood stuff.

I downloaded sketch up and I already made a design. My design is simply but fulfills my needs. As I said, I don't have any experience in woodworking. So I sketched my design in a way that I can have the pieces cut where I am going to buy it (they only do straight cuts). 

I have a jigsaw and have tried to cut before and....well my results, are not that great. 

Here is a picture of what I have so 
far










Basically is somewhere to place my display, monitors, mixer, midi controller, and full sized 88 keyboard on the drawer. Two 4u racks space, and a space for my CPU and random stuff on the other space.

But I have 2 main questions:

1- Firstly I was planning on doing it on 15mm MDF, prime it and paint it. I went to my hardware store today and the MDF price is about $27. Buy they have a laminated melamine 15mm for about $31. So I can save a lot of money and time, not having to buy sealer,paint, wait for the paint to dry, etc.

Would you think melamine would be a good choice?

2- I am planning to have the keyboard on the "2nd floor" in a drawer, with heavy duty rails . My questions is do you think the wood by itself would provide enough support for the keyboard? The rails say that they support up to 100 lbs, and they keyboard weights around 50-60. But I don't know if the wood where the rail will be attached would hold?

Please, help me. or any ideas of what I can improve, bearing in my mind, that I am planning on doing only the assembly myself, as I don't really have experience in cutting..

Thanks



Ps. I almost forgot: I Live in El Salvador, so the stores here don't carry nearly as stuff as they do in the States. So mdf,plywood or melamine is mainly what I can find here.

Thanks


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## Steve Neul (Sep 2, 2011)

In the long run I don't think you would be happy with MDF. First of all it's very heavy and would make the desk a pain to move around. Then after all it's just a thick sheet of paper so it will eventually sag in the kneespace area. A better choise would be plywood however the kneehole space appears to be too wide. The image is too small to make out the dimension but shouldn't really be larger than 76.2 cm. What you have on the drawer boxes looks alright. Normally we make the drawer boxes out of 1/2" material and the drawer slides will work fine. 

Not having any experience it's kind of an ambitious project but if you take your time you should be able to do it. You are going to need more tools though. A table saw would be very helpful but if that isn't an option you might at least consider a hand held circular saw.


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