Serving Trays #3: Finishing the First Tray.
I’ve departed at this point from working on the 2nd tray, as I’ve decided to go another route. Rather than a veneered surface, I’m going to inaly a compass rose into a solid floating panel of curly maple for the tray bottom. Look for that in a future post
In the meantime, I’ve put a nice thin layer of shellac with a tiny hint of dark vintage maple transtint (~ 1 drop:dixie cup of shellac) onto the panel, then allowed it to dry thoroughly. Then I very very lightly sand that back with very high grit paper or even steel wool.
I finished it up with 3 coats of Polyacrylic from General Finishes. I brushed this on. For a while, I’ve been scared of brushing, preferring to wipe on an oil finish, which I find a lot less risky. One my favorite ’simple’ finishes is Watco Danish Oil, but it takes quite a while for oil finishes to completely cure. Poly is a lot less forgiving, but provides far better protection than a danish oil type finish, which is necessary for a serving tray, as you’ll be exposing it to light heat and the possibility of spills.
You can see the tinted shellac gives a nice hue to the panel and makes the figure stand out better.
Once the panel was fully dry, I went back to the shop and assembled the tray.
Note that the tray sides themselves are still unfinished. The dovetails themselves needed a little bit of cleanup, and the sloping sides of the ends needed some blending into the tray sides.
The tools I used to do the blending are all visible in the photo. Some light paring, scraping, and sanding gave us a clean surface ready to finish. The tray itself will receive no finish treatment other than the Polyacrylic topcoat. The Padouk looks great all by itself. To prevent too much extra finish from pooling on the tray, I taped it off.
And now with two coats of polyacrylic.
Fin!
