If you’re planning to build a desk from scratch this weekend, I’ve got the perfect plans for you. The Wooton Desk is an elegant, functional desk that’s fully customizable with a variety of different sized drawers and cubbies for all of your gear. Today I will search the internet for the best (hopefully free) Wooton desk plans so you don’t have to!
For those of you that have been reading my ‘epic woodworking plan search’ articles, will know that there is a lot of spam and misleading content on the interweb regarding woodworking plans. This is the whole reason I started making these posts to hopefully guide you through this maze 🙂
So less of the waffle, let’s get searching….
Before we dive in, I wanted to mention that I have a pack of woodworking plans that I personally use to save time searching all over the internet. If you’re interested, you can take a look at it by clicking HERE.
Internet Based Plans
My last woodworking plan search was for grandfather clocks, and that went surprisingly well. Let’s hope that today follows suit 🙂
Of course, I started by finding the usual spam posts like this one…..
Yeah, purple39togo is the perfect name for a woodworking plan site, right? 🙂
It looks like someone put this website up in a hurry and forgot all about it 🙂 Let’s hope we start finding something better soon 🙂
I stumbled across a page on Core77.com (yeah another weird site name I know), but they actually had a good collection of Wooton desk images and a diagram that could be helpful to woodworkers trying to make such a DIY desk. However, I wouldn’t quite call this a plan as such, but helpful all the same.
There is a site with a very inspiring name ‘Wooton Desks’. To be fair they also have a decent page with old images of a Wooton desk plan of sort. Like the one above, it has some diagrams and a few measurements, but I wouldn’t call this the type of blueprint style plan that a woodworker might need.
Finally, I managed to find a Wooton Desk article over at Madness in Miniatures. As the name would suggest, this is a miniature model of a Wooton desk, but I still think this could be of use to the regular DIY woodworker at home.
This is the best quality and most detailed breakdown I could find at the time of writing. It walks you through step by step the build process of making such a desk, as well as having an image of the Wooton desk plan used. I know this is not perfect, but it seems to be the best woodworking plan you can find for free on the subject 🙂 Just scale up the measurements from the plan. We are feeding on scraps here!
Youtube Based Plans
I was hoping that Youtube was going to offer something better, but it was hard to find anything on there Wooton desk specific. The best I could find were talking about roll-top desks.
As seems traditional for these woodworking plan search posts, I found a super old and grainy set of videos from New Yankee Workshop. If you can get past the grainy quality, these guys really know their stuff, and walk you through step by step the process of building a roll-top desk.
The guy below walks us through the build process he went through to build a roll-top desk based on a set of paid plans he links in the description. Although not exactly a Wooton desk, this set of videos are very useful and of high quality.
Finding a Wooton Desk Plan is Tough!!
As you can see, it is not easy finding plans on the internet, in this case both free and paid plans. If you are interested in woodworking you will find that paid plans are usually anywhere from $10-25 each. Take a look at the plan sales page of Lee Valley to see what I mean. I would recommend finding a bulk pack of plans instead for a cheaper price, meaning that you will have enough plans to last you a lifetime. I know of one that has thousands of plans in it for just a little more than one of the $25 plans mentioned above. You can check it out yourself by clicking HERE.
Good luck on your own Wooton desk plan search, you are going to need it 🙂
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Wooton Desk?
The Wooton furniture company was initially based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1870, William S. Wooton obtained patents for his design and established the Wooton Desk Company. Production continued until about 1884. The Wooton Furniture Company also produced a so-called rotary desk, which is in fact a pedestal desk whose pedestals have segments turned at an angle. Boom.