Serving Trays #2: Joinery
The stock is very uniform in color and straight grained, so there wasn’t much to match, patternwise, but I laid it out anyway just t
o be on the safe side.
I then roughed out and pattern routed the ends and the handles.
With the rough shaping done, it was on to joinery. I ganged up the long sides, and cut the tails all at once.
At this point, it appears I may have stomped on the photos of the pin cutting. Suffice to say, it was pretty vanilla work.
Tapped together, we’ve got a nice square tray frame. It even sat flat!
At this point, I felt comfortable moving on to the tray bottoms. For the first tray, I’m going to do simple veneered MDF panel of f
igured anigre I picked up in a bargain bin at the local Rockler. There’s a little bit of splitting and wrinkling, but the flitch wa
s quite inexpensive, so I don’t mind!
I gave myself a straightedge with which to bookmatch.
Then I taped and glued the panel
While the panel was in the bag, I routed a 5/16″ groove in the base of the tray frame on the router table. 5/16″ is a nice fit of a
the substrate plus 2 layers of veneer, as the MDF is never perfectly 1/4″.
I cleaned up the panel edges from the veneering, cut to size, and did a little fitting and tuning, and then performed a dry fit.
Looking good! Next segment, I’ll pre-finish the panel, then do a glueup, joint cleanup, and final finishing.
