Marquetry Serving Tray #4: Small design change, Construction of the frame, and cutting out letters

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Last night, I set on the task of cutting out all the letters. I ended up just printing out the photo and using that as a guide for cutting them, which worked well enough.

Only problem was that I split some of the letters. I’m going to be re-doing the M, A, S, W, T, and I still need to cut the B (it was obscured by the flag in the photo). This is one major drawback of using the X-acto knife method for cutting veneer. It has a tendency to pull too much on the veneer when cutting cross-grain and will split it if you have a small width.

Here’s a rough mockup on how it will look:

Tonight, I decided to start making the frame for the tray. The idea was to take use of the daylight hours to work on the frame and save the veneer work for at night. I live in a townhouse in a densely populated area, so I try to keep all power tool use to before 8pm.

While on the way home from work, I decided to scrap my initial idea on how to make the frame. I figured this would look better in a pseudo Greene & Greene style frame, so as soon as I got home from work, I had to start doing some research.

Came up with a rough idea on how I wanted it to look based off of some photos found online, and started cutting. I used a nice piece of Sapele which I planed down to 3/4”. Then, I ripped two 2” wide pieces and two 3” wide pieces from the stock. After that, I needed to lay out the cloud lifts and finger joints.

Keep in mind that I have never done anything in the Greene & Greene style before, and was basing my proportions/measurements solely off of photos. I ended up with two 1/2” lifts on the ends of the tray, with 1/2” radius corners and 1-1/2” spacing between lifts. To trace the radius, I used a tip that I had heard many years ago and found an automotive socket that was roughly the radius I wanted to use, and used that as a drawing guide. From there, it was off to the bandsaw to cut it out. Once I got the cloud lifts cut, I had to decide on the spacing for the box joints. Since I was working with 2” wide stock for the joints, I decided on upper and lower fingers of 5/8”, and a center finger of 3/4”. The length was determined to be the thickness of the stock (3/4”) plus 1/4” protruding from the ends, for a total finger length of 1”. Cut them out at the bandsaw, and did the final fitting with a chisel.

This was the result:

3 of the 4 joints were nice and tight, but the 4th is a bit loose. Nothing major, just a bit more than I had originally wanted. I may try to glue in a few strips of veneer to close it up, but I’m not entirely sure yet.

I still need to shape the fingers, cut the holes for the handles, and rout out the dado to accept the plywood bottom. It’s starting to come together, though.

Source: LumberJocks.com

Marquetry Serving Tray #4: Small design change, Construction of the frame, and cutting out letters