Shower Room Vanity Unit - Part 9 - The top and drawer pulls

Top Panel

The top is made from a nice piece of sapele that was thicknessed to around 22mm (7/8") thick. The front of the panel was designed to protrude 40mm beyond the cabinet and tapered down to around 12mm with a 10x30mm bevel.
The panel is made from two boards jointed and glued up. The glue joint was cleaned up with a combination of cabinet scraper and random orbit sander.
The taper was done by hand with a combination of jointer plane and smoothing plane. I must say sapele cuts like a dream with no tearout if you have sharp blades and observe the grain direction. Long whispery shavings emerged from both planes when nearing the completion cuts.

A beautiful pristine sapele top

The only thing to spoil this was the fact I had to cut a rectangular hole into is and a cutout on the rear to clear the water pipes. It really is a difficult to get your head around but I got out a battery drill and bored 4 holes. Then the jigsaw made short work of cutting out the rectangle. The rear cutout was easier once I had "butchered" the top!
The edges were smoothed and I veneered a thin sliver of sapele on the end grain. Once cured and cut flush the right hand edge and the front edge had a 1/8" radius ovolo router cutter run over them to create a sharp edge and radius.
When sanded back to 220 grit the top was sprayed with some tap water. When this dried the grain was raised and I knocked it back with some 320 grit lightly done with the ROS.

Cut-outs added

Again this panel was pre-finished with several coats of General Finished Exterior 450

Drawer Pulls

The pulls were made from a wenge pen turning blank I had in stock. I simply run them through the planer and then tilted the table saw blade to 17.5 degrees to make the cut-outs for the fingers. The piece was then run through the router to radius the top edge. I cut each pull to length using the cross-cut sled on the table saw and then finished each piece by hand.

These too were pre-finished with Exterior 450 after drilling some pilot holes in the rear of each.