Finish Sanding
I spent a few hours with my random orbit sander on the fronts, and sides. I learned a bit about my new drum sander in the progress. It is set up with 80 grit sandpaper. It does a pretty good job but the consistency isn't great. There must be a couple of large grains somewhere on the roll because the end result isn't perfectly smooth and the pieces have a couple of deep grooves.
I should probably have replaced the 80 grit with a 120 grit but instead I just gave each piece a little extra loving attention with my random orbit sander with 80 grit and everything worked out fine.
Next I used the template to draw the feet on the front and back and rough cut them on the band saw. The next step was to clean up the cuts by using the template and a flush trim bit in my router table. It worked out okay excepting a few pieces where I should have back routed to avoid tear out. A little sandpaper cleaned up most of that.
The next steps are to mount a dado blade in the table saw and cut the grooves and dados in the fronts and sides and the rabbets on the bottoms. Then it's just a matter of gluing up all the pieces and finishing.
I've got a long weekend coming up so hopefully I can get to at least the finishing stage.
