I started building this aquaruim stand because I was offended by the pile of chipboard my local pet store was trying to sell me to go under my new fish tank.

The major woods are oak and bloodwood (the red colored wood), with maple for the drawer pulls and white parts of the inlays. As well, I did use some copper for the tendrils of the jellyfish and some purpleheart for some parts of the jellyfish. The table top is curly maple.

It features jumping dolphins inlaid into all three sides. The tops of each leg have three panels, inlaid with a jellyfish (man-o-war actually) or a seahorse. There is a little drawer under the fish tank to hold supplies, and the handles for that are sand dollars.

Here's a detail of the jumping dolphins. I found a picture of of a dolphin leaping against the sun from the web. I then put into Photoshop and twiddled the contrast until the dolphin was basically at maximum contrast against the background, at which point Photoshop was able to extract the dolphin image from the rest of the scene. I then resized it and printed it as my template.

Here is detail of the panel at the top of every leg. The seahorse was a complex problem because you have to take the width of your jigsaw blade into account if you don't want to end out with gaps in your inlay design. That meant that many times I had to introduce extra cuts just so that I could push the wood together afterwoods. You can see those joints particularly in the curve of the tail if you look carefully.

The man-o-war has copper for the tendrils. I cut the strips of copper on my tablesaw from a sheet of copper, pressing the sheet of copper between two scrap pieces of plywood to keep it rigid while I cut it. Then I put the copper strips between the inlay pieces and pressed it all together to shape the copper before glueing. On some of the jelly fish, I tried to model the jellyfish body, which didn't work out - too much detail.

Here is detail of on of the drawer pulls. They are modelled from some sand dollars that my wife found on the beach. Construction is fairly straightforward - turn a sandollar-shaped knob on the lathe, and then work with a chisel to make it slightly less round (sanddollars aren't perfectly round). I also shaved the shape to add some planes to the face of the sanddollar (the face of a sanddollars isn't a perfect disk either). For the sanddollar gills, I (carefully) used the littlest bit (1/8 inch) in my router table. Then I finished up with some detail carving on the top of the sanddollar to make the petalloids

The legs are attached to the body with mortises - you can see the ends of the tenons in this picture. The tenons are split tenons. That is, the tenon is bandsawed down the middle, creating a tenon that can be wedged outwards. After the tenon is placed in the mortise, a wedge (little piece of bloodwood in this case) is put in the slot and gently tapped down with a mallet. This means that the tenons were mechanically secure and didn't need glue (I glued them anyway). That the reason for the darker wood in the middle of each tenon. It's pretty, but it is also functional.

There is a string inlay of bloodwood on the legs which I built based from an article in Fine Woodworking. (FWW#116 String Inlay). You can see a detail of the inlaying here, from the bottoms of the legs.

The white at the bottom of the leg is a piece of teflon, cut and simply screwed in from below (inset of course) so as to provide some anti-scuff for the table. Considering that the table is held down by a 29Gallon tank, I probably didn't need to worry about the thing moving ;-)