After a long break during the back deck rebuild and Winter, I finally got back to finishing up this wooden tray I started back in August 2024. I wanted to make a bigger wooden tray - longer, wider, deeper, so I picked out a piece of this light colored hardwood from the endcuts bin I picked up last year. Not sure what type of wood, but it is HARD. It has some interesting grain patterns and I only had to trim one end to get the square size I wanted. Overall, at this size and maybe the hardness, my Forstner bit / router plane approach isn't really holding up. Drilling the holes for initial inside bowl was fine, but getting that router plane all the way down there to smooth the bottom, was quite a struggle. I ended up using chisels quite a bit in an effort to just smooth out the worst of the ragged lines, never mind a flat bottom. I would pick away with a chisel off and on through the Winter, but eventually I decided to just sand it all and finish it up.
The size of the hole was such that I had to make a bottom extension for the router plane. This meant I had even less depth I could reach with the actual bit, and it was at it's limit - just didn't get a good solid bite/stroke.
This was about as good as I could get with the router plane - rough! From here I took the chisels to it and managed to smooth out most of the roughness.
Here we are mostly sanded down - actually looks pretty nice, with all the sawdust hiding the ridges and holes. :) I used a combination of hand sanding up to 180 grit (mostly for the inside) and a sander for the sides and bottom. I did a very slight round on all the edges and corners.
One coat of Tried & True, and a week of drying/rubbing to buff it up. Now we can see all the rough imperfections I never got out with the chisels and sanding. Rough!
This is the final product - bottom side. The bottom and sides turned out really nice and smooth, with some nice grain patterns. I attribute the finish here to the random orbital sander work. In hindsight, I think I would have put the extra time in going up to 220 grit for that final super-smooth.
And the inside, with all the tears, holes and rough inside edges shining in full finished glory. I think I would make some smaller trays or inset holes again, but not interested in this size of tray, at least with this method.
