Bone shaped dog bowl holder out of solid oak - present for my sister in law's pup.
I first cut the inner circles out using a router (had to make a quick and dirty circle cutting jig):
I left a little bit of the material which I cut out using a jigsaw. I cleaned up the jigsaw edges using a spokeshave as I was doing this part at night without any power tools.
Then cut out the outer shape on the bandsaw the next day.
Thought of a lot of ways to join the legs to the top. Didn't want a boxy look, so decided to make some legs and glue them and using screws to reinforce it (ran out of time to think of a proper joinery procedure as it was approaching Xmas quite quickly)
So I cut the leg blanks out of the same board, and cut the shapes.
Clamped all the leg pieces in the drill vice and drilled two counterbored holes in each.
Used double sided tape to stick the legs on to eyeballed positions and transferred the holes on to the main piece.
Then I test fitted the bits without the glue. Also found a natural crack, which I fixed with some super glue. The screw length required was in between two standard sizes so selected the longer ones, drilled and tapped them to a depth on the main piece and then cut the screws to size (all of this had to be done after Xmas dinner, so no time to get the screws!!)
Couple of snags but nothing major. Then I used a punch to dot-mark each leg to its position and whipped out my old cabinet scarpers X 2(couldn't use the sander and the vacuum at 11 pm, let alone on Xmas day!!)
Deburred it and established 4 new edges in total. Then took my HSS rod and created 8 new burrs. Took less than 8 mins.
Scraped the main piece and the legs, including some of the edges which the spokeshaves didn't do a good job on -all without having to redo the scraper edges.
Then just sanded with a hand sander with 320 grit for 2 mins a piece and I was done.
Glued and screwed the legs.
Then brought it into the kitchen and only then thought to test whether it was level or was it rocking. Fortunately there was no rocking whatsoever (plenty of time for it to develop!)
Applied a home made beeswax + butcher block oil mix (at 3.45 am on boxing Day!!) and left it for a few hours.
Woke up in the morning, have it a good buff and wrapped it to be gifted later that day!
Couldn't find the branding iron in the recent workshop reshuffle, but was alright.
Was very well received. Sadly forgot to take pictures after I buffed it. It showed lovely grains.
Wanted to personalize it with the pup's name, but ran out of time!