Wave Tray

Howdy, I’m Wave Tray.

Not much to say that hasn’t already been said in my other tray posts.

• All wood is 1/8” solid hardwood


• Overall inner dimension 6.5” _^X 8.5”. Overall height 1.25” (not including feet).


• All surfaces sanded to 600 grit, though that was likely overkill for two very open-grain woods.

The exploration of interesting (at least I think so) butt/finger jointed tray designs went to another iteration. I was trying to move away from just highlighting the corners as in my last couple of trays, instead going for a more “whole canvas” design that takes advantage of more of the available side area.

The canarywood brings such richness and variation, ranging from reddish to a honey gold. It really plays off the warmer parts of the wenge’s dark brown. I haven’t chosen a liner yet but am leaning toward a rich honey gold cowhide leather that I picked up at Tandy on Black Friday. I chose to finish the wood with mineral oil, it is completely color neutral and I wanted the wood colors to come through as simply as possible.

As I said, not much to add in terms of technical details. I’ve pretty much got my workflow down, there were no real surprises here. It’s satisfying to have a smooth process but I do miss the little challenges and problem solving that comes with entirely new projects.

EDIT: there was one new thing I tried with this design.

When butt joining delicate pieces near an edge you sometimes see overburn on sharp corners that make it look like an unsightly gap is present on the butted edges.

To fix this I extended my joints past the final edge, making a “bump” where the faces come together.

After sanding it yielded a really clean joint.

I’m definitely going to do this trick going forward.