Live Edge Table Progress & Plywood Shelf Design

This weekend has been and will continue to be rather hectic, so this post will be short on the verbiage and more picturecentric. Hope that you enjoy it none the less.

OK, so I've continued slowly working on the Live Edge Table. At this point, as you'll see in the photos below, the overall form is complete. I finished the stretcher and mortises and currently have the table dry fitted. I am less than proud of my joinery, but chalk most of the errors up to the learning process. The biggest issue is sloppiness and plenty of it. The biggest cause for the errors, aside from inexperience, is quality chisels and honestly the patience to keep my crappy ones sharpened. The old 1970's Stanley's I have from my father hold an edge about as well as a historical re-enactment holds my 12 year old son's attention. Hopefully one of my next significant acquisitions will be a decent set of chisels. I've been ogling a set or two from Tools For Working Wood. From this point the project turns into to a shaping and sanding and shaping and sanding project. As noted in my previous post about the project, all the edges on the legs will be rounded over and blended into the top of the table. You'll notice in the photos that I've played with curves in the stretcher and it will also receive the rounding and shaping treatment. In the end I'll have to use some epoxy to compensate for some of the looser joints. I plan on shimming as much as possible and then use the epoxy for gap filling. I will post a future update as the project wraps up.

In other news... I am trying to finish my miter saw station that I posted about a few weeks ago. While it is fully functional as a miter station, I never completed the shelving behind the fence or installed the t-track on the fence. Well below you'll see a couple of Sketch-Up images that show the general design. I haven't shown the edge banding, but I do intend to use 1/8" Red Oak strips on all the exposed plywood edges. The first image it is the final completed station, minus the t-track. The substructure, miter extension table and fence are already completed. The second image depicts the shelving and bin storage unit design that remains to be constructed. This will be my first project using my new Bosch Router and the first time I've used dados as the primary joinery. I've made an exact wide dado jig for the router, so hopefully a couple of practice runs and I'll be ready to go live. Unfortunately there isn't a local source for quality plywood, so Lowe's Birch 3/4" will have to suffice. I figure its a shop fixture, so good practice anyway. Again, I'll post an update as I get this one rolling too.

Until my next post:

KEEP YOUR MIND ON YOUR FINGERS AND YOUR FINGERS ON YOUR HANDS…