Walnut Trays for Gifts

I recently needed to make a wooden tray as a gift and ended up making two. They are both made from leftover pieces of walnut from a previous furniture build. They also each have a carving in the bottom of the tray of the outline of the state of Tennessee. I filled the carvings with orange-tinted epoxy and finished the trays with shellac.

We have had an exchange student from Guatemala staying with us for the last two months and she is returning home soon. I had the idea of making a tray like this for her as a going-away gift. I thought it would be a nice memento of her time here in Tennessee.

I ended up with two trays because I made the smaller one as a test piece. At each step in the process, I would work first on the small tray before working on the “real” tray. In the end, both came out and we will use the smaller tray as a Christmas gift for one of my wife’s coworkers.

It turned out to be a good idea to have a test piece because I did make one significant error while working on it. The project starts as a two-sided carving project on the CNC. While testing my design on the small tray, I forgot to zero the z-axis after a bit change. This resulted in a cut going too deep on the bottom of the tray and this is why the small tray does not have the handles at each end. At first, I thought the small tray was a loss but with a little work on the router table, I was able to salvage it.

The details of creating the project in VCarve Pro and cutting it out on the CNC are beyond the scope of this write-up. After those steps, I sanded the two trays and then filled the carvings with TotalBoat Table Top epoxy that I had left over from a recent job. The epoxy was tinted with FIREDOTS Burst Orange Mica Powder. The orange color didn’t stand out as much as I had hoped but it still creates a nice effect depending on the lighting. At least it does in the larger tray where the size of the carving is correspondingly larger and therefore has a larger volume of epoxy.

After allowing the epoxy to cure, I used the CNC to clean out the bottom of the trays and then sanded the area of the carvings. For this sanding step, I used this Milwaukee 12-volt Orbital Detail Sander. I use this sander quite a bit. It is one of the better tool purchases I have made in the last couple of years.

The final step was to apply shellac. I used an Astro EuroPro LVLP spray gun to apply the shellac. The shellac I used is mixed from denatured alcohol and de-waxed super blonde shellac flakes.

Overall, I am very pleased with how the two trays turned out and look forward to making similar projects in the future.