Tray

I know I ought to have been making cutting boards, but they just don’t excite me – obviously I’m not a real lumberjock yet! Anyways, I’ve just about managed to finish this tray for a Christmas gift for someone.

Although not looking quite as good as what was in my head, I’m actually fairly pleased with the result – not perfect, far from it, but I designed it with several significant challenges for me along the way, and, with the exception of that quarter of a second when the router got away from me cutting the last (of course it was the last) slot for the handles, it went fairly well.

I normally try to avoid designs that require a high degree of precision, but here I forced myself – the slots had to be in exactly the right place, and exactly tight enough so that the tray would actually work without the handles slipping out, which would have been bad – thankfully it’s passed the wife’s “10 tins of dog food” test. The hardest part, in fact, was rounding the corners of the splines and the handle spacers to fit in the routed slots – perhaps there’s a cool way to do this, but I went with “sand, test, sand, test ….. sand, test”.

Riga pine handles top and surround.
Mahogany (found on the dump) splines and handle spacers.
Plywood of unknown origin that I’ve been carrying around for the last 20 years – it’s strange stuff – from one angle quite dark, from another almost honey coloured, as you can see.
Finished with tung oil.

-- "Do not speak – unless it improves on silence."