Thanks, Taylor.
The wood is aspen that I picked up at Lowe's. It's the same wood I used in the cabinet for my Cirrus (underneath the Dragonfly) that I did a natural finish of. It's a nice light and strong white wood. I assembled it using a dowel drilling jig and wood pegs along with glue, after rounding off the edges with a router. I haven't jumped on the finger joint bandwagon and probably won't. Butt joints with pegs are extremely strong and much simpler to work with, as long as you're happy with the look- which I am.
I used Watco Danish Oil to stain it (I think the color was "mahogany" maybe? I can't remember). I just followed the directions on the can (IIRC you hit it with two coats). After that dried I followed roughly the same procedure I did on the Cirrus cabinet. John Lyons outlined it for me a few years ago. The finish is one part each polyurethane, linseed oil, and thinner. You basically rub it on with a rag, wet sand it, let it dry- repeating 3 or 4 times with finer grit sandpaper each time. You have to let it dry overnight and being in Florida I kept a fan on it too, which helped a lot. Takes a week or so for the whole finish process. After that I applied a thin coat of paste wax and buffed it out. IMO that really gives it the consistent finished "shine" look. I thank John for talking me into that.
It's far from perfect. I learned you really don't need to wet sand the edges, as you can see the results of that on the right edge. Also, the stain doesn't take where there are glue beads, and comes out darker on the edges. Someone on another forum mentioned that a sanding sealer could be used to keep it from getting dark like that. But in all honesty I think it would be a lot easier just to use a darker piece of wood and finish it natural. So I'll probably forego using stain in the future. But I wanted to give it a try and overall am pretty pleased.
