The Joinery Begins.....

So here I am routing out the mortises in the feet that will accept the Legs. These are a bitch to chop out by hand so I have a way to hog out a majority of the waste with my router and two parallel edge guides. After carefully marking out the mortises I will plunge route out the waste. The festool router makes this process very easy. I have chopped mortises many different ways, this way seems to me to be the best way to go about the process. The router and edge guides make it easy to precisely position the router and make the cuts. The bench screws act as stops on either end of the cut.

When I made my work bench from hard yellow pine I chopped the mortises by hand. This is before some one told me I could hog out the waste with a drill. Though slightly nostalgic, I will never ever chop mortises that way again. It was a long hard process that required my 1/4" mortising chisel to be sharpened 5 bagillion times to stay sharp and accurate in the cut.