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You don't always have to make enormous size wood projects to create something impressive. Sometimes smaller items can be every bit as impressive if you add some creative elements to them, in fact, often they can be better because they can be more portable and used more often, such is the case with our serving tray.
In this article and video we create an ordinary serving tray, but make is a bit more extraordinary by combining different woods and creating a rudimentary inlay in the tray bottom. Remember that this is the kind of an item that will show off your woodworking projects every time it is used so take time to make a good job.
Serving Tray with Holly Inlay
In our case, we started of with 3 kinds of wood. The sides of the tray are something called Locust wood. A hardwood with a prominent yellow tinge to it. For the tray bottom we wanted to use a plywood product because it is more stable and will move only slightly. To add a bit of a WOW factor we selected Holly wood for the inlay as it will contrast nicely with the Mahogany Plywood tray base. We wanted this project to be
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Here's a question for you! How many cutting boards do you have in your house RIGHT NOW? I'll be you have at least 2 and many of you will have 3 or 4. And, if you are up on the latest news, the wooden ones are still the best because the natural chemicals in the wood, the oils and tannins for example, are anti-bacterial apparently. That's right, the natural oils in wood actually kills bacteria, making wooden cutting boards more food safe than plastic cutting boards. Amazing!
In this article we explore not only the aspects of making cutting boards, but we will also touch on revenues that can be made in selling them. If you think about how many houses there are in your country and that each one of them has at least 2 cutting board, you can see that the potential for selling cutting boards is quite significant. But you can't just throw together any cutting board, you need to make something unique, different or otherwise more useful than just the run-of-the-mill cutting boards that can be found in many stores. And, if you have some sort of a venue where you can sell them yourself, like a flea market, garage sales, on-line etc. there are many different ways of selling and distributing cutting boards, we'll leave that part up to you.
Cutting boards can be made from pretty much any kind of wood. Hard woods work best because they last longer. In my opinion, the best cutting board wood is Oak because it has both tannin and natural oils to help combat bacteria, but any wood will work fine. Then next thing you need to decide on is design ...
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Hand made items always a welcomed gift and in this article we are hand making small gift box that will hold a bottle of wine. The box is attractive, easy to make, and when you show up at any party, anniversary, wedding of retirement function with one of these, you are going to get invited to many, many more!!! People LOVE these little boxes.
For the woodworker, it's a win-win, you get to use up little pieces of wood that we all accumulate in your workshops, and you get to use many of the tools in your workshop and end up making something that people really like.
There are many different ways you can make these boxes, what we have shown here is only one variation that you can then use to create your own unique wine gift box (or any other kind of gift box, chocolate, soaps, spices, jams, the list is endless).
For this box we wanted to end up with a bunch 3/4" by 3/" strips of wood, 14" long. You need to work MORE CAREFULLY when you are using smaller pieces of wood, so what we did was use a little bit larger pieces and cut them down.
Making Gift Wine Box
We started off at the router table, with a 3/8" roundover bit. This is used to to take the edge of just 2 sides of the strips of wood that will become the sides of the box. The inner sides need to be left plain as they will be glued and possibly tacked to the gable ends.
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It's not very often that such a small woodworking project requires so many different tools and requires number of skills from the woodworker. In this video we made a working coffee grinder, well actually we purchased the grinding part from Lee Valley tools and made the wooden base that the grinder sits on.
It sounds like a pretty easy project but we decided to make all the corners of the box as box joints. Inside the outer box is a drawer that catches the ground coffee bits as the handles is turned and beans are ground. Then, there is one last element, so that many of the coffee grinding bits do not fall between the drawer and the outer box there is an inner lining that makes sure the ground beans all fall nicely into the drawer.
Making a Coffee Grinder
The first element is to make the outer box. We adhered to the instructions packaged with the grinding component and found them easy to follow and accurate, so why not make things easy and follow their instructions. Since we decided to make box joints for the outer box we needed a box joint jig (which we also needed for other upcoming projects too) so we made that first of all (see our other videos for details on this).