A good project for your shop is building this sled jig to accomplish 3D scooping of thicker stock that will reveal more interesting grain appearance as well as adding some depth to your projects which too often settle for just plain, flat material pieces comprising the project.
Note how the upper sled which carries the router, allows a side-to-side placement as well as the forward and back motion controlled by the radius of the sled “ski’s” on either side of the jig. The best bet is to use a plunge router with incremental depth stops to do many passes of a smaller amount of stock being removed with each pass as opposed to loading up the router and over-loading it trying to take out too much on one pass. About an 1/8″ at a time is the sweet spot. This jig takes a little time to fabricate but the results you get for repeat scoops on a project are visible in the example pictures as well as on our gallery page where the desk is featured with multiple aspect views.