Router Table - Dovetail Etude

I want to get better at woodworking. In the past, my concept of woodworking was to laser cut plywood and super glue it all together. Needless to say, my ability to use wood was very limited and my creations were very flimsy. But I just bought a portable woodworking table and I want to be better. I want to be able to do joinery and make sturdy furniture. So, for my first project on this new workbench, I have decided to make a router table where the primary joints are all dovetails.

A dovetail is a joinery technique used to join two pieces of wood, where one piece has been cut to form a trapezium shape (tail) and the other has a corresponding hole cut into it. The two pieces can then be glued together to form a strong joint that doesn’t require any mechanical fasteners. To make my dovetails, I 3D printed some jigs that could be clamped onto the wood and guide my saw to cut at the correct angle. The jigs also had magnets inside to prevent my saw from going off course.

Once all the dovetails were made, the whole table went together pretty quickly. I used two sheets of glued plywood to make the top of the table and routed a hole for the router mount. I finished the table using shellac. I did a pretty bad job with the routing and sanding so to cover my mistakes I cut a sheet of polypropylene to act as the top surface.