Once the top joint had set I did a little sanding with some of Festool's Granat padded sanding sheets that come on a roll. These are great for hand sanding and seem to last a long time.

Then it was onto the back piece. I decided the back needed a little 'interest', so I set about putting a curve in it's sides. As the curve would be the same on each side, I thought it best to make a template. Digging around in Simon's offcut bin, I found a sheet of 3mm MDF that was perfect. Using a set of french curves, I set about drawing the curve.

I don't know of a magical formula for this. It's all about trial and error. After a few revisions I landed on a design I liked and could move on to cutting it out. As I was working with a small sheet of 3mm MDF, I didn't like the idea of hanging it over the edge of the MFT to cut. So I took some blocks and clamped it up high enough that the blade did not contact the MFT top. This meant I could clamp the workpiece on both sides and keep everything rigid.

Taking a bit of extra time with this setup allowed me to have full concentration on cutting to my lines. The Carvex Jigsaw makes it very easy to see what you are doing with it's strobing light, which makes the blade seem as if it's stationary. For this cut I used the cordless psb 400 jigsaw which allowed me a little more flexibility and control, not having the lead to deal with. However, I did obviously suffer from not having dust extraction connected. It's a bit of a shock once you get used to such good dust extraction, when you don't use it. Dust? on my MFT? How Rude!

Taking it slowly and carefully with a good Festool Fine Tooth Jigsaw Blade, I managed to get a pretty clean curve. But to perfect it, I turned to sandpaper.

The Festool Hand Sanding Block HSK-STF-46x178 has a flexible nose on the front, which really helped conform to the curve and achieve a uniform continuous flow. It didn't take a lot of work and then it was onto using it to make the curves in the back of the table.
I used the template to mark out the curve on both sides of the back panel. As before, I used the MDF blocks to clamp the board high so I could work on top of the MFT. This time I used the multi-purpose Festool Trion jigsaw blade (S 75/4 FS/5).

After each side had been cut I stuck the template to the board, leaving about 1mm revealed all along the curve. Using a flush trim bit in the OF 1400 router, I set the bearing to run along the edge of the template. This allowed me to quickly pass the router along the edge of the board, trimming it flush with the template.

This produced a lovely clean edge on both sides of the board, ready for edging. We prefer to use the thicker 3mm real wood edging, as it leaves a more durable edge and also looks better. In Simon's cabinet making workshop, he used a commercial edge bander. But for the purposes of this project, we used TiteBond II and masking tape to glue the edging.

I left it over night to cure properly. To flush trim the edging to the board, we used our MFK 700. This little trimmer makes light work of this task. It's so simple to just run it along the panel and quickly get a smooth edge.

Next was milling the dominos to join the back to the top. I held the curved top up against the back and marked for 3 dominos.

Milling the slots for the back panel was simple enough

But the curved top was a little trickier. After some thought, we clamped the curved top to an MDF board. This allowed us to use the MFT to reference the joint and keep the slots true.

Another tricky glue-up ensued. For this joint we decided to use a 24hr epoxy, as it's the area most likely to fail. Using an epoxy meant that the wood would break before the glue joint. Clamping the joint called for some thought. We re-used the upright board idea in the previous picture. Setting back at the far edge of the MFT, we could add clamps to hold it down to the table and then used the fixed MFT clamps to apply pressure towards the joint.
Here's how it looked once we had got the epoxy on and clamped it up.
