The Drop Leaf Table Addition: The Incremental Cost of Design Complexity

This entry builds on a previous one where I described a part design paradigm based on complexity where every new feature added to a single part required more caution than the last, because once a part began to acquire more features along with the time and effort required to produce those features, the part itself began to incrementally increase in value. A mistake with each additional new feature machined would therefore prove increasingly more costly than the operation itself to complete that feature, as the number of features were added to a part to complete it.

I found myself trapped in that same concept as I routed the final half-inch quarter-round profile on the two opposite edges of this table top. Each part that makes up the top assembly is fairly simple in and of itself not counting the walnut panel quadrants with their computer numerically control routed circles, but the assembly of those parts was done in stages that included a complex cope and stick edging process between the center panel and its two opposing front and back edges. Routing the small dado that ran along both side edges underneath the top was difficult enough until I had to begin the last process.

The last process in completing the top was to route the large quarter-round profile on the two side edges without the router bit blowing out the ends. I really had no choice therefore but to use a hand-held router instead of the router table, and because of the larger router bit, I had to use a plunge router instead of one of the smaller, more easily controlled hand-held fixed-base routers I own.

No single one-pass, large removal of stock occurred as I routed the quarter-round profile. It was light passes all the way, taking off only a little at a time to insure a clean, smooth, issue-free profile using a tool not exactly well know for its finesse. A mistake here could have cost the whole top. I obviously pulled it off, but if I had not, that incremental cost concept would have come around to hit me hard. Very hard.

Like the saying goes, just because you can doesn't always mean that you should. Although in the end, risk paid off in the final result.