Shaping the slats

After I finished cutting, joining, and sanding the slats I noticed something about them: they have very sharp edges. "Sharp" is not a good property for kid's furniture. I decided to break the edges by adding a chamfer along the edge. I like a chamfer better than rounding -- it looks more refined.




Ordinarily I'd add a chamfer either by sanding, or using a block plane. But I've got 28 slats to shape, each with four edges -- that's 112 edges to chamfer! I need the process to be quick and produce a uniform chamfer on all edges. The ideal tool for this job is a router table with a chamfering bit. Since I don't have a router table and the parts are small, I clamped the router upside down in my bench vise.

This set up worked really well, and all I had to do afterwords was lightly sand the edge to clean it up.