For my final blog post about this serving tray I sanded all of the wood filler to make it all smooth again. Once that was done, I added two coats of wood stain including the underside. Finally, I'm left with the completed serving tray! There are things that I would do differently if I were to make this again, but for my first real project, I think I did a pretty good job.
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I noticed there were some noticeable gaps between my corner pieces and sides, so I decided to fill it in with some wood glue. I think I might have added wood filler in places that don't need wood filler, but I want everything to be smooth all around so I'd rather add more than less. This does mean I'll have to sand again, but I'm hoping it will heighten the quality of the tray. I also chose wood filler that was a bit darker, as I didn't know if a lighter coloured wood glue would show through the varnish I picked out.
Now everything is flush together and you can barely feel any difference between the pieces. I used 80 grit to remove the sticking out bits on the corners and then I used a 150 grit sanding square on all of the faces. Once I thought everything was smooth enough, I used a 400 grit sheet of sandpaper to make everything very smooth.
I don't have any after photos at the moment but I will include them in the next post. Once all the corners where glued in, I had to sand down the sides in order for everything will be flat with nothing sticking out. I have learnt that sawdust gets absolutely everywhere after this since I was sanding for around 3 hours and now my moms car is covered in sawdust. Once I was done making everything flat, I made sure I didn't feel any indents or small gaps with my finger, just to make sure that it felt like a singular surface.
The first image is from before the corners were glued in. I wanted to make sure the pieces fit before I put glue on them. Again, I had to do this in the timeframe of two days. If I were to do this again I would have bought more clamps in order to keep consistent pressure on all sides that are being glued together. I also found that my clamps get pretty heavy when they're only attached to one side of the tray, so I had to add some weight to the other end and had to improvise. I did make sure to put a scrap piece of wood underneath the weight so it wouldn't dent into the base of the tray.
I made sure everything lined up with the base and I glued in two sides. The glue I'm using takes 24 hours to fully dry, so I waited a day to glue in the other two sides. If I had four more clamps I would have been able to do this within a day, but everything worked out. Now all of the sides are glued on and I don't think they'll be coming off anytime soon.
After a lot of thought, I decided to not make any elaborate corner joints, mostly because I no longer have the time to do something that works. In the end I decided to just glue the sides on with a good amount of glue. Unless I decide to carry something over 30 pounds, everything should be fine. I also had to make the decision to not put in the handles because I don't have the tools to do this efficiently. The tray isn't really effected by this though, because the height of the sides aren't too tall, so it's still comfortable to hold without using handles. Next time I do something like this, I'll have to start earlier because I've found that time goes by really fast. At the moment I have two sides glued on and all I need to do now is to cut the rest of the edges off of all the sides to keep the hexagon shape, glue the other sides in place and cut down the corner pieces so they fit and glue them in. Finally I'll need to add finishing touches and I'm done!
Alright, this looks like a little bit of overkill, but the base pieces came together in a "v" shape because of the problems I had with the dowels and because the edge that the two pieces meet up on was somewhat curved. I already applied the glue, so I decided to get some reinforcements to make sure the base was flat. In the end, the base is as flat as I could get it to be, I just hope the glue won't warp over time, since there's a small bit of pressure being used to keep everything straight.
While trying to put together the two base pieces, I ran into a problem I wasn't having before I glued in the dowels. I'm guessing, before I glued in the dowels there was a bit more wiggle room which made it possible for the base pieces to fit together, but once everything was glued in, there wasn't any wiggle room. To fix this, I drilled a hole into a scrap piece of wood and I put the two sides together and marked where the dowel was hitting the wood. From there, I positioned my piece of scrap wood over where the hole needed to be, and I drilled through there, using the scrap piece of wood as a guide.
After making all the adjustments I needed, I glued in the dowels. Before gluing I made sure the pieces fit together.
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