I built a table for my porch

Thanks!

See that little rectangle sitting on the near corner? That's a coaster made of pine, walnut and maple.

We'll see how well my joinery holds up. This is actually the first project I've successfully built with f'real tenons.

Oak is rapidly becoming a favorite material of mine.

Wait checks blueprints shit you're right I read this in inches and it's laid out in feet. I'll find something to use it for though.

I did most of the joinery on a router table with some help from the table saw and a bit of hand finessing with chisels.

All but two of the mortises are routed. A 3/8" up-cut spiral "end mill" bit in the router, set the fence the shoulder thickness plus the reveal away, mark the extent of the bit on some tape on the table, mark where you want the mortise to stop and start on the work, plunge in, run a groove, then either stop the router and wait for it to stop or plunge out. These were 3/4" deep so I did them in two passes. This leaves a slot with rounded ends which I squared with a chisel by hand.

You see the I-shaped brace? The two mortises in the middle of the short braces I did a more traditional way, drilling out some of the stock with my drill press and then chopped the rest out with a chisel.

All of the tenons were made with the router table and the table saw. I've tried and failed before to form tenons with my dado set in the table saw, ie "cut two rabbets" because I can't seem to get the precision I need from the table saw's depth setting. So what I did was mill the stock with my thickness planer very carefully to precisely 3/4" thick and crosscut them using a stop on my table saw's miter gauge so opposite pairs were exactly identical, used the fence and the miter gauge together to make precise shoulder cuts (this is not a through cut, no off-cut was left trapped between the blade and the fence so this is safe, but if it sketches you out you can use a stop block or a sled) then I set up the router table basically for rabbeting with a straight bit, if that makes sense. The two wings of the fence opened with the bit set almost but not quite 3/4" high and protruding 3/16" out of the fence. I then ran the stock vertically against the fence to make the cheek cuts. Two 3/16" cuts took a total of 3/8" out of the thickness leaving a 3/8" tenon that fit snugly into the mortises. To make the side cuts I did a couple of them with a dovetail saw, got bored and then used the sled on my table saw to put them through the blade vertically. A little bit of cleanup with chisels, a hand scraper and some sandpaper and the dry test fit was surprisingly sturdy.

The top panel is held on with metal Z clips that slip into a groove in the aprons cut with a table saw and then they screw into the top, otherwise it's just a flat panel.

That's Minwax's Helmsman semi-gloss spar urethane, thinned 60/40 with paint thinner and wiped on with rags cut from an old T-shirt, 4 coats, 8 hours in between, buffing each coat with a little chunk of paper grocery bag in lieu of high grit sandpaper. Learned how from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@paulsDIYsolutions

Thinking of getting into woodworking?