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19K views 31 replies 11 participants last post by  popeyekris 
#1 ·
Introduction/Design

My mom approached me about doing something for my father for Father's day. Only requirements were that it was to be something for their boat, and that it have the boat's name on it. Other than that, I had complete creative freedom.

I came up with the serving tray idea since they frequently prepare food down in the galley and have to bring it to the back deck for eating, and they currently just use some plastic serving tray.

For the design, I decided that a prominent Compass Rose in the center with a circular border around it, and putting the name of the boat around the compass rose would be best.

For reference, this is the name that will be used on this tray:



And here's a partial photo of the wood being used:



I had planned on using the super curly veneer in that photo for the compass rose, but later decided against it and bought some dyed white veneer that had some birdseye figure in it



The background for the tray is quartered Sapele, with Wenge and the dyed white wood for the compass rose. The circular border was going to be bloodwood as seen in the first photo, but I decided to make a rope border instead of a plain circle, so I used Mottled Anigre for that. Finally, for the letters, I decided to use some fiddleback Anigre that I have which has a great figure and should match the semi-gold leaf looking lettering on the back of the boat.
 
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#3 ·
Lets get started

First things first was to size things up. I decided on a 14"x18" size, based off of some general dimenions pulled from several commercial available trays. It is small enough to ship easily, but should still hold enough to be worth it.

From there, I created the background by "jointing" 2 pieces of Sapele veneer to get straight edges, and then used veneer tape to hold them together. There isn't any photos of this step as I completely forgot. Plus, it's some tape holding 2 plain pieces of veneer together. Nothing really exciting going on yet.

From there, I needed to decide on just how large I wanted the compass rose to be. I mocked up the rough size with printer paper and drew it out a bit more accurate than my first draft.



After I decided on the final size, it was time to start cutting. For the 4 main points on the compass, it's pretty straightforward to figure out. You have your overall length, which is 1/2 of the total length/width of the compass. Next up, you have a 45 degree angle at the inner point so that all 8 pieces will mate up exactly. After you decide how fat you want each point to be, you draw a straight line from that corner out the the very tip and then you are done.

The secondary points are a bit more difficult. For that, how fat your points are determines the angles needed. You also have to determine the length. For mine, I decided to make mine such that a line between 2 main points is the extent of the secondary point. I ended up cutting out a drawn secondary point and used that as a guide as I was happy with the proportions. I couldn't tell you the angles used, so just use whatever looks good to your eye.



Once I was happy with the fitup, I veneer taped everything together, making sure to trim off the extra tape that would get in the way. I flipped it over to the backside and laid it on the backside of the background to see how it would look.



And both right side up:

 
#5 ·
Cutting the Border and inlaying it all

Next up comes the tedious task of cutting all of the pieces to make up the rope. Somewhere north of 60 pieces for the border alone. I found a pattern online with the right diameter I wanted, so I printed out a couple copies, cut them up, and taped it down to the veneer I want to cut it from.



After cutting it all out, you are left with this:



While that would look all well and good on it's own, I decided to give shading a try. This is the first time I've attempted it, so hopefully it will turn out ok. I pulled out the woodburning tool I bought from Michaels over a year ago for about $15, put the shading tool on, and got to work.



While it looks ruined, a lot of the shading should be taken off when it's sanded. Hopefully.

Once that was finished, then it was time to inlay the Compass. I put it in the center, lined up all the points, and traced it out with the knife. Cut it free, and was left with this:



Once I got the compass in and taped to the background, I set on the task of inlaying the rope pieces. For this, I took another rope pattern and cut it into quarters. I decided to trace around the outside of the whole section of rope rather than doing each part individually. This went fairly quickly. To put the pieces in, I put some clear tape on the underside of the cut-out area to keep the pieces from moving around, and then used veneer tape once I got them into position. Once the veneer tape started to dry, I pulled the clear tape off and the pieces stayed where they were.

The backside:



The gaps there are on purpose as I will be filling that in with a very dark wood dust and glue combo to further enhance the rope detail.

That's where I left off for the day. Next up is the lettering for the name, followed by laminating it to the bottom ply, and working on the solid wood sides.
 
#10 ·
Small design change, Construction of the frame, and cutting out letters

Last night, I set on the task of cutting out all the letters. I ended up just printing out the photo and using that as a guide for cutting them, which worked well enough.

Only problem was that I split some of the letters. I'm going to be re-doing the M, A, S, W, T, and I still need to cut the B (it was obscured by the flag in the photo). This is one major drawback of using the X-acto knife method for cutting veneer. It has a tendency to pull too much on the veneer when cutting cross-grain and will split it if you have a small width.

Here's a rough mockup on how it will look:



Tonight, I decided to start making the frame for the tray. The idea was to take use of the daylight hours to work on the frame and save the veneer work for at night. I live in a townhouse in a densely populated area, so I try to keep all power tool use to before 8pm.

While on the way home from work, I decided to scrap my initial idea on how to make the frame. I figured this would look better in a pseudo Greene & Greene style frame, so as soon as I got home from work, I had to start doing some research.

Came up with a rough idea on how I wanted it to look based off of some photos found online, and started cutting. I used a nice piece of Sapele which I planed down to 3/4". Then, I ripped two 2" wide pieces and two 3" wide pieces from the stock. After that, I needed to lay out the cloud lifts and finger joints.

Keep in mind that I have never done anything in the Greene & Greene style before, and was basing my proportions/measurements solely off of photos. I ended up with two 1/2" lifts on the ends of the tray, with 1/2" radius corners and 1-1/2" spacing between lifts. To trace the radius, I used a tip that I had heard many years ago and found an automotive socket that was roughly the radius I wanted to use, and used that as a drawing guide. From there, it was off to the bandsaw to cut it out. Once I got the cloud lifts cut, I had to decide on the spacing for the box joints. Since I was working with 2" wide stock for the joints, I decided on upper and lower fingers of 5/8", and a center finger of 3/4". The length was determined to be the thickness of the stock (3/4") plus 1/4" protruding from the ends, for a total finger length of 1". Cut them out at the bandsaw, and did the final fitting with a chisel.

This was the result:





3 of the 4 joints were nice and tight, but the 4th is a bit loose. Nothing major, just a bit more than I had originally wanted. I may try to glue in a few strips of veneer to close it up, but I'm not entirely sure yet.

I still need to shape the fingers, cut the holes for the handles, and rout out the dado to accept the plywood bottom. It's starting to come together, though.
 
#17 ·
More construction on the tray frame

2 night ago, I was able to re-cut some of the letters in an effort to not have any broken pieces. The S and W continued to split on me, but I was able to get a nice M, A, and B so I will count it as a success.



Last night was fairly productive. I was able to use my router with a 1/4" bit to cut a dado in the 4 sides of the frame to accept the plywood bottom. The 2 shorter sides had to be stopped dadoes so that they would be hidden when the frame is assembled.

Once I cut the dadoes, I set to rounding over the "fingers" for the joints. I wanted the roundover to go as far down as the next piece would cover, so I marked all the joints 1/4" from the end, and pulled out a rasp.



To roundover the edges, I cut a 45 angle on each side with the rasp, eased the resulting edges, and then smoothed over the whole face.

This is the result:



I continued that process for all of the fingers at each of the 4 corners. In the end, it will give me joints such as this (This joint is a bit off since it's not the actual 2 pieces that will join together, just happened to be the order I grabbed them)



After I got all of that finished, I put everything together for a dry fit

 
#20 ·
Making some pegs, changing the design a bit, and disaster

To keep with the Greene and Greene style theme, I decided that I wanted to use some black square pegs on the finger joints. Headed over to Rockler hoping to find a turning blank of Ebony, but the only things they had was Salt & Pepper sized and about $80. I ended up spying a piece of African Blackwood that was 1.5"x1.5"x6" that would work out perfectly.



Took it to the bandsaw and resawed a 1/4" wide piece off, and then sawed that piece up into 1/4"x1/4" strips.

From there, I chucked a block plane up in my vice, and passed the pieces over the plane a few times to clean up the bandsaw marks.



From there, I cut them into 1.5" long pieces

Since the pegs typically have rounded faces in G&G, I used a technique that I saw from a William NG video sometime last year.



Chuck the pieces up in a drill (or drill press in my case), and use a sanding pad backed by something soft like rags. I started at 80 grit and went all the way up to 320 grit. Then you square the sides a little bit by sanding a bit more with the 320 on each side.

Here's what you are left with:



Almost polished faces on them. Each piece has both ends done in this way. Once I assemble the tray together, I'll cut them to be about 3/8" long, as they are only decorative to cover up the dowels that will be used for strength.

I also decided to change up the design on the handles a bit. After looking at it more, I didn't care for the cloud lift and couldn't come up with an opening that looked good. So, I revised my design to this, which is still a design prevalent in G&G furniture:



Once that was finished, I set to laminating the veneer work to the plywood backing. I guess during the glue up the boards I was using for cauls weren't putting enough pressure or weren't flat enough because the glue up came out a bit wavy. When I tried to sand it down, it pulled some rope pieces off, sanded through in a few other places, and just looked absolutely horrible. I attempted to fix this by splicing in new pieces, but they stuck out quite a bit. There really wasn't any way to make it look acceptable, so I decided to scrap the effort on this. The areas like the lettering looked fine (although a bit thin in the M), but any attempts at fixing just made everything worse.





Back to square one. This was about 10pm last night, and I decided to start again on a new background. Decided against the rope pattern since it didn't turn out like I had wanted to, even the areas that did stay attached. By 1am, this is what I was left with:





Now I need to re-do the lettering, inlay that, glue everything up again (and correctly this time).
 
#21 ·
Great save. Too bad the rope pieces didn't work out, but you can always give it a go another time. I can easily see how difficult the rope is to inlay, especially when being cut by hand. The new background motif looks very good though even though it's not rope.
 
#25 ·
Nearing the end

On Monday night, I was able to finish all of the lettering on the re-do panel. Once again, the small letters kept breaking. That's one of the biggest downsides to cutting veneer with a knife. With a scroll saw or a chevalet, you don't pull on the veneer. When you cut cross grain with a knife, I've found that I need to take super shallow passes on anything that is thinner than about 1/4" wide or else it will just break the veneer. I.e., I need to take 4 or 5 cuts to cut through the veneer rather than my normal 3ish. After cutting out half of the letters once, about another third of them twice, and a couple of them 3 times, I was able to get a full set of letters that would work.

At that point it was just the standard taping down with clear tape, tracing with the knife, cutting out the background, veneer taping it in place, and moving onto the next one. Once I got into a rhythm, it didn't take long to finish.

I won't bore you with a photo of tape on the background again, but after I laminated it to some 1/4" MDF and sanded off the tape, this was the result.



Not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than last time. If I would have had more time I'm sure I could have gotten it better, but it will do for this piece.

Last night I was able to glue the backing onto the mdf piece, trim it to size, and sand everything down. I ended up with some air bubbles on the backing, unfortunately, which had to be fixed by slicing them open, injecting glue, and putting it back into cauls. The result is less than desireable, but given that it's on the bottom of the tray, I can live with it.

Once that was dry and sanded again, I was able to assemble the frame and panel together. I opted to use dowels in the joints to make it stronger, which you can still see some poking out that weren't trimmed flush for the photo.



That brings me to tonight's work. Using a chisel, I was able to pare all the dowels down flush with the sides of the frame to prepare for the decorative pegs. From there, I drilled out the pegs roughly 3/8" down and then squared the hole up with a mortising chisel to accept my decorative square pegs. Again, since I was working quickly, the results are acceptable, but not perfect.





Once that was finished, some sawdust+glue wax mixed into the gaps, and everything was finish sanded, I fired up my compressor and was able to spray a couple coats of lacquer onto it before finishing up for the evening.

This is not the final finish, as it still needs to be leveled and then a few more coats added. Additionally, the finish wasn't completely dry yet on either photo so it looks a little different at the moment.



 
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