The weekend of the 12th we went down to Fresno, to pick up Allen for the week, and to get our new Porter Cable 7518 router and Jessem Mast-R-Lift lift. I managed to get the router lift hole cut into our router table, but with Allen around "helping" there wasn't much chance to actually accomplish anything with it.
Finally, yesterday I got a chance to put some bits in the new router and see what it does. Wow, what an amazing difference between the old fixed speed cheap router and this one, all sorts of tear-out issues on the maple just disappeared. And, of course, I can now swing the big bits that actually make the profiles we're wanting, rather than cutting bad approximations with multiple passes of other bits. I think we're getting pretty close, obviously I'm still having a few issues getting the miters exactly on, but this shape seems to be good.
This just has a coat of thinned shellac on it, I need to hit the mahogany with a pore filler, and we're thinking that we might want to use an oil based polyurethane on the maple to accelerate the orange aging just a touch.
