My dear friend got married and I presented the couple an offering of tray-shaped wood. The tray is Bocote (which smells exactly like pickles when planed), the trim and legs are Goncalo Alves, and the inlaid letters are strips of walnut. Here’s what I learned from this project.

I made this up as I went, changing the plan five times a day. This is usually not recommended, but in the end, the schematics happened to work out beautifully. I have recently been obsessing over how to fasten tabletops to table aprons and how to handle joinery between boards with different grain orientation. The issue:

Wood happily expands and contracts (shut up, Omobono) with humidity and temperature. But it doesn’t shrink uniformly across all three dimensions. The biggest dimensional variation is ACROSS the rings of the tree, and the most stable dimension is along the length of the wood grain. The tea tray by nature is already subject to temp & moisture fluctuations – it might get washed, hot liquids might spill on it, it might live in Houston…. we must not let poor choice of joinery be another reason for warp:

Note: the downside of slot & pin is the ends of the crossing piece may not stay flush to the edge of the board. In the case of this tea tray, it is not functionally crucial that they stay flush. A cupped tray would be far worse. So basically, the board is sandwiched but can move freely between the differently-oriented legs and trim, and that trim piece is further held down in this sort of lap joint thing:

So, hopefully this will make sense now:

More tray stuff to come on Wednesday!

Please feel free to comment if you’d like to elaborate on this wood expansion/contraction topic, pick on the design of this tray, commission something from me (yes! come on, pleeease 🙂 ?), or whatever!