The Mango Desk project came to us from a great family in the Central Gardens area. They had recently returned from a vacation where mango trees grow locally and saw a few small items made from it's wood. They loved the look of it so much, that they decided to use it to build a new desk for their home office. They began their search for a slab large enough to fit the desired space and found one that both fit their needs and looked amazing. The slab made its way to CityWood via Turner Woodworks. John Turner discovered CityWood while at the local wood working store, "The WoodWork Shop." Turner Woodworks typically builds cabinets and built ins and was looking for someone who had high end experience and equipment to handle building this type of large furniture.
Once we received the slab in our shop, we began our craft. There were actually two slabs that were going to make this desk. One slab was 14 ft long and the other slab was 8 ft long. These slabs would be joined together in an L shape to make a unique corner desk.
The family really loved the natural edge lines of the slab so we worked to blend the two slabs together both naturally as well as structurally. We started out rough flattening the large 14 ft slab with electric hand planes to get the surface all in one plane. Once we had the slab relatively flat, we then ran it through our 36" Wide Belt Sander to get both sides flat and sanded. After we had the slab rough sanded, we started on the joinery of the two slabs. We decided to join the two slabs on a natural curve to help match the grain patterns. We also used Dominos for structural support and alignment of this joint.
With the L joint now complete, we moved on to the "waterfall leg". The waterfall leg concept allows the grain of the wood to stay continuous from the top of the desk and down the side of the leg. We build our waterfall leg with a double reinforced joint that gives it strength for heavy loads and is built to last forever without separation. We glue up the new joint also with Dominos and now we are on to the finish.
We spray finish our furniture with a very high end commercial conversion lacquer. This product is very wear resistant as well as resistant to high acid content foods like wine, mustard, etc. Once sprayed, its time for a quick photo shoot and the off for delivery to the wonderful home!
Check out more pictures of the desk on our Flickr Page https://flic.kr/s/aHskfZtF6W
Thanks for reading and watching!
Matthew
