This is an instrument panel for my classic wooden cruising sailboat which I just finished and installed a few days ago. It was a tricky bugger to build. Take a look at the slide show:
The problem was the corner pieces - I didn't have a piece of teak that was thick enough to cut the corners on the square, which would have eased the handling and clamping problem, but I did have some eight-quarter stock that I could use on a 45 degree diagonal to get the radius out of it I needed. Not only that, it had nice curved grain across the width of the piece so that I could curve the grain around the corners, more or less.
I'll describe these in the order I placed the pictures in the Photobucket slideshow, although Photobucket may not show them to you in that order. The site has never been very good at getting that right. Nevertheless, it'll be pretty clear what you're looking at, no matter the order you see them.
The first couple pictures are the finished piece, mounted on the boat. The third one is an assembly picture, after I'd shot the slots with the Festool Domino tool. The last two are after the glue-up, with the back panel in a routed rabbet. By then I'd bandsawed the inner curves and smoothed them on a drill-press-mounted drum sander, but hadn't yet shaped the outer curves. Those I did later by bandsawing outside the line and sanding to the line on a large disk sander. Some router table work finished up the edges.
The straight pieces are sixty-year-old Burma teak, and the corner pieces came out of some stock I've been carrying around with me for about thirty-five years. The back panel might be about that vintage too.
One problem with finishing it was that once you started brushing on the varnish, there was no place to stop until you'd done both the complete outside and the inside as well, about an inch and a half deep into the piece. it was sort of like varnishing a coffee cup while you're holding it by the handle. So one of the pictures shows the cradle that I rigged up to sort of float the thing in mid-air while I was finishing it. I could move it around some by the dowels to position it - turn it over, tilt it up on edge, and so forth.
I like the Festool tools, as you can see by the background in one of the pictures, but there's no way that I could afford to have one of those Dominos in my shop for an occasional job like this. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow it.
Tom