New to woodworking, question about build.

[tawdry violet]

I am fairly new to wood working, I have so far only built a little box and a poorly made desk.
I am looking to build the table in this photo as it seems very easy and it's something I want. The table itself is made of metal and close to $400, I think I could build this cheaper, my only concern is strength.

If I use pocket holes to attach 4 of the 2x6 boards long ways to the 2 2x6 boards width wise will 4 total pocket holes on each board be strong enough to hold enough weight for someone to lean on it etc??

Made a 3d model for refference (not to scale) Although you can see the boards going across would have pocket holes udner it. In the model you can see the orange highlighted cyilinder shapes, those would be the pocket holes.

Or would dowles be a better option?

[copper inlet]

I would not be comfortable with pocket holes in this application even if you were accounting for wood movement (and you need to)

the only way I'd be comfortable with the perpendicular boards is with mortise and tenon joints. The term for that end style is "breadboard" end

[tawdry violet]

Okay what are some tools I'll need to grab to do a tenon and mortise joint ?

And when I make those joints would I put glue in there similar to dowles or just let it slide in and hpld?

[copper inlet]

a router could do most of both tasks, the deeper mortises on the ends will be trickier

you only glue the center of the panels

[tawdry violet]

By that do you mean like where the boards are next to eachother? I want to have a little bit of a gap

[tawdry violet]

Do I need a steady hand for this? I'm very bad at cutting straight etc haha

[copper inlet]

oh, you're using gaps to account for movement?

then each board can be mortised into the end directly

[tawdry violet]

Yes, I planned on something like that

[copper inlet]

Worth noting, you'd simplify your life by many orders of magnitude by just running the parallel boards to both ends

[tawdry violet]

Oh wait, not I am tlaking about the gaps here

I don't want a gap on the end pieces

[copper inlet]

yea, I understnad

that desire will take a significant amount of work to do properly

[tawdry violet]

Ah okay, now say if I just do pocket joints and don't take account of the wood moving how would it affect it? I only want the table doe something to learn and make for practice and wouldn't care if it breaks a year down the line

[obsidian heart]

If i might chime in here:

Quitepossible is correct, a router can do most of this, and followup with a drill, and youll be solid. If you want to use this project to learn then this will be a good one.

I wouldnt worry about the steady hand. Place a straightedge along the back of the router the appropriate distance and clamp it down. Run the router along that and you’ll have a straight cut.

My suggestion: lay all the long boards alongside each other, set your straightedge, and mill off 1/3 of the thickness of the boards. Then do the other side, flip the boards and do it again. That will make all your boards equal. Set them all on edge, and route the same depth, along that same line, turn, flip and get all of your tenons equal

Take your breadboard ends, mark where you want the tenons to go in, set them on edge, and route out mortises. Your tenons at this point will be square, and your mortises will have round sides, so you can either route the mortises a little wider to accommodate, round out the tenons, or square up the mortises with a chisel.

If you dont have a router yet, i would recommend the bosch router, and pick up the router guide (straightedge with two metal rods that slide into the router base), and a 1/4”,3/8”, and 1/2” spiral upcut bit, (just one will work for this project, just decide how wide you need your mortises to be first)