Thread: "Better" serving tray design?!?!

Very nice Vern, I like it

Consider it copied

if you hate it that much send it down here I'll make good use of it and (ahem) think of you each time its used.

Vern,

That’s Avery clever and clean looking tray.
Very very nice.

Cheers Matt.

Good thinking, Vern. I've noted the idea & will sincerely flatter you in time with some imitation.

Cedar would not be my first choice either, unless the item was only intended for carrying fresh bread rolls.
At least its softness allows it to tolerate a bit of cross-grain stress without cracking. The cheap Hoop pine & Cedar furniture of early last century seemed to rely on that with some very poor practice like glueing & nailing drawer runners across solid wood sides. It's remarkable how long some of these things survived!

Many certainly didn't - I was once asked if I could fix a family heirloom cedar chiffonier. I said I'd come & take a look at it, but the owner said, "Oh, no worries, I'll bring it round". It duly arrived - as a flat-pack in the boot of her car! The whole thing had been assembled with rubbed glue-joints - the long grain joints were still hanging on, but the cross-grain joints had all given up. Remarkably, the glue had failed rather than the wood - must've been a bad batch of hide-glue! What amazed me more than anything was that the piece had help up ok for 50 or 60 years before succumbing to the inevitable....

I reckon (barring nasty accidents, of course), your tray will be around loong after we've lost interest in woodworking....

Cheers,
Ian

I like the look of it, and I reckon the design will handle wood movement well. It will need to - river oak will move lots with humidity changes - so I reckon you've chosen a good timber to prove your design.

Originally Posted by IanW

Good thinking, Vern. I've noted the idea & will sincerely flatter you in time with some imitation.

Cedar would not be my first choice either, unless the item was only intended for carrying fresh bread rolls.

If nothing else they will be light as a feather which the ladies will like! Our club has quite a lot of New Guinea Red cedar we scored a few years back and I thought this might be a good way to use some up . . . but I'm well and truly over it already How sharp does a chisel have to be cut across the grain of this stuff

Originally Posted by TTIT

..... How sharp does a chisel have to be cut across the grain of this stuff....

I dunno Vern! I recently used some recycled "old-growth" cedar that was harvested long before I was born. It was dark & dense (for cedar) & I thought, bewdie, this'll be a breeze to chisel. Ha! - it was worse than some cedar I got from my brother a few years ago, which was from a young tree. It was pale & softer, but cut a little more cleanly.

Part (probably a large part) of my problem is that I bought a set of L-N B.E. chisels back when I still had a bit of disposable income. At the time you could choose either O1 or A2 steel, & being in my "harder is always better" phase I went straight for the A2s. To retain any versatility with these I have to stick with a high sharpening bevel or they micro-chip when driven into anything a bit hard. But with soft "crushy" woods like cedar & old hoop, the less acute edge won't cut cleanly no matter how keen the edge is. The only way I can get reasonably clean bottoms on D/T sockets in cedar with my L-Ns is to work back very carefully from several mm in front of the scribe line, taking cuts about as thick as plane shavings. That can get a bit tedious on a large set of drawer-fronts! In retrospect, I reckon I'd have been much better off with the O1s, at least O1 can be sharpened with a much lower bevel without fear of chipping (& takes half the effort to get sharp!).

I've got a few old Titan B.E, chisels & next time I decide to work with cedar I'll use a couple of those ground to a 20* bevel & see if that improves matters....

Cheers,
Ian

Part of the problem seems to be that, while ARC is soft, it somehow seems to blunt blades very quickly. I think it may be because of silicon content that has evolved to deter termites.