A family member received a motorized, adjustable-height desk frame and asked if I could make a desktop similar to the cutting boards I gifted everyone at Christmas.
I started by narrowing the wood selection process down using a PhotoShop mockup. We played around with a variety of woods and the order & size of the wood strips until we finally landed on the combo they liked:
We then went to CP Johnson Lumber to get the wood. They had everything except the Wenge. So we stopped by The Fredericksburg Workshop to see if they had any – no dice.
There is a shortage on Wenge as it is an endangered species because of over-exploitation and reduction of habitat; on top of that, the COVID-19 World-wide lockdown has essentially stopped production and shipping.
But we were able to find someone on Craigslist that was selling about 20 board feet of Wenge at a fair price, so we picked that up (and I now have plenty of Wenge for future projects).
I glued the strips of exotic wood in three sections in order to fit my 13-inch planer. I then glued those three sections together using a biscuit joiner for alignment.
For a final planing, I constructed a router sled and used a 2-inch planing bit to level everything before sanding and finishing with a water-based polyurethane.
I then installed threaded brass inserts to mount the top to the Jarvis Adjustable-height desk frame.
