Raised dog dishes Pt. 4

Day for went a little slower than day 3, but I still made A great deal of progress. I started off by finishing the apron pieces, all I had left to do was rout the button grove. The groves are 5/16″ of an inch deep by 1/4″ wide. That’s to much material to remove in one pass, so I took 5  1/16″ deep passes. The groves came out Ok, but if I feed to fast, they router bit complained.

What really consumed a lot of time was the next step, tapering the legs. This is the first project I’ve incorporated tapers into. It took a lot longer than I though it would, to get the jig set up correctly. Eventually, I got everything dialed in and was able to batch out the legs fairly quickly. One thing I need to remember for next time, is to not use an 80 tooth cross cutting blade. While it left an excellent finish, my little contractor saw was working really hard to make the cut.

I finished off the evening by routing the the 1/4″ cove into the outer corner of the legs. As before, the router table made this a real pleasure. The table makes routing small narrow pieces so much less nerve racking than by hand. I don’t have to worry about the router rocking, or the piece sliding around. All I have to do is push the piece down against the top, and back against the fence, and go.