Above: We ended up using this quite a bit. We were especially careful when using this highly efficient tool -- wavy edges are bad.

There seems to be a law of carpentry which dictates that no matter how many times you measure you're going to have pieces that don't fit together quite right. That's where the sanding comes in! Annoyingly, we had some problems with the radial arm saw... so some of our pieces were nearly an eighth of an inch too long (better than too short). Carefully attacking each piece with a nice belt sander fixed most of these problems.

Essentially, sanding is unavoidable (at least it was for us). Almost every single step of the process required some perfecting with various implements such as a Dremmel, belt sander, and some good old fashioned sheets of sand paper.