I started gluing up the base of the coffee table. There are four sides, and I decided to glue up all four separately to make sure that I got all of the pieces in the right spot. Here’s the first:

This is one of those instances where just laying the frame on top of the bench will suffice with the clamps in place. If there were some issue with the frames not being flat enough, I could always weight them to the benchtop (which is flat, of course), but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

To aid glue-up, I made a little spacer block to jam in the sides to make sure that I get the correct offset for the little vertical stretchers:

This first one went well. The second one has a minor issue with the offset of the top stretcher. It should not really be a problem, but if it does, I’ll figure out some way to correct it. Hopefully the rest of the base will go smoothly. These tenons are very tight fits; it’s somewhat difficult to jam them into the right spots under glue-up time pressure.

So this is getting somewhere. I’m also in the process of varnishing the top.