Closeup:
But in a couple of weeks I should be getting a bigger desk that looks like this (I'm building it myself):
Show Image
How'd you join those pieces? Biscuits or dowels? What about the joined seams...too big for a planer/drum sander...
Biscuits and dowels are so 1990's :D, I routed in a glue joint to each of the maple pieces and two on the purple heart
I bought the maple as a 11" wide, 1' thick, 11' board which I cut in half to make those two pieces and then just bought a piece of purple heart that was wide enough to make the desk around 29" wide. Instead of planing, since the wood has a ton of curls/tigering, I used a large area surface sander. It's like a planer but it uses sand paper to take off material rather than knife blades. If we would have used a conventional planer, we would have had a **** ton of chip outs on the boards due to all the curls. After than we let them sit for a week just because we exposed so much surface area. The next week we put in the glue joints and then this weekend I started sanding. I'm guessing I'll have two more weekends of sanding and then one weekend to finish/coat it.
BTW here are some close ups of the maples figuring.
Hope that answered your question ;D