You should grab a burnisher for that card scraper…

If you’re going to try it, my advice: mix some very fine sanding dust (maybe 120 or so) with some poly with a putty knife until it’s a really thick paste, and then jam it into the cracks… it’ll shrink a little so be liberal with it and just sand it before you do the final finish. If you’re really artsy too, you can actually paint on matching grain with acrylic and an incredibly fine brush to help it match. I’ve also just filled up cracks with sawdust and applied a few drops of poly, but it never seems to match quite as well for me that way.

I actually need to try something new for my next oil finish project too, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this post, haha.

Always worth doing a test piece first. I haven’t had any good results with glue (wood or CA), but if I’m finishing with polyurethane, making a filler with the same poly as the ‘glue’ is next to perfect.

I’m going to have to try this! Very curious about just how hard it turns out to be in the end.

Just been thinking about this a lot because the feet really bug me somehow. I think it probably is do-able as other people have mentioned, but also, are you sure this is a real box someone made and not AI-generated? I hate to have to ask it, but these days… and man, why don’t the feet visibly support the box? I guess it could be inlaid… like I said, I don’t think it’s impossible. Just odd somehow.

Oak’s the one that really gets me.

Lovely! Does the top just slot into the body?

As long as they’re both water-based and you scuff it up a little with 120 beforehand, you should be fine, although I haven’t used that specific set of finishes. Can always do the tried and true and try it out on a test piece first if you’re really worried.

But yeah, TBH, even if you went crazy and used epoxy or urushi, pretty sure it’d get scratched up with kids being kids. I use 10+ coats for specific applications, and it’s very scratch resistant (in fact it seems more more than the technically harder urushi… this is where I redact a few paragraphs of finish hardness discussion…), but standing up to kids, nah.

I really like the bottle stoppers. Not sure I really have anything big enough but I’m going to see what I can glue up. The bigger pieces are usually softwoods too, unfortunately, but even just carving something decorative for the top could be cool.

I did try that once but you’re right I should give it a go again with better wood choices (verawood is just too waxy to glue unless you treat it right I guess.)

Ohhh, I hadn’t even thought of that, and I have done some small epoxy projects before. I guess the question would be then what after that… But at least it would be a bigger chunk to work with.

90t 10" Diablo does plywood without affecting veneer.

Well now I know what else I’m buying on my next trip to the hardware store…