This is a rendition of my first ever CAD 3D solid model! When I was a new start graduate engineer at Short Brothers in Belfast there was a two year programme spending 50% of the time in your home department and 50% touring the rest of the factory. There was a two week stint in the CAD department (at that time CADDS 4X on Sun workstations) and we were left pretty much to ourselves, so I started playing. Shorts shut for Easter and Christmas and stayed open for St Patrick's Day and the Twelfth of July, so I would take a fortnight at Christmas and a week at Easter to visit Mum and Dad, which usually involved a turning project of some sort. This time we made a coffee table for my sitting room out of English elm, which is pretty hard to find thanks to Dutch elm disease, but occasionally you get lucky and find a wood yard with a couple of pieces. From memory this was one 1 3/4 (44 mm) thick, wany edge board and a couple of lengths of 3x3 (75 mm x 75 mm) for the legs. Dad had a table saw, a band saw, and a planer/thicknesser, and I spent my first term at Sir Roger Manwoods Shool learing to make tenon and mortice joints, so off we went. The top is fixed with buttons (L shaped pieces) that go into a groove in the top rail of the frame, and wouldn't you know it Dad had a grooving plane, so I learned to use one of those too.
