Hello, I am adding am adding a handle to a butler tray I made and am struggling with how I should attach them. Should I just glue them? Or do they need to be re enforced with maybe a couple of dowels? Or is there a better way all together?
Thank you for the help
Replies
Gluing them should be fine. If you're worried about it screw through from the inside. It looks like you have enough meat to be able to plug the holes if you don't want the screws to show.
Fancy wood. The woid is all long grain, so you could just glue them. If it were me, I would make elongated hole in the ends for handles, and skip the extra parts.
Thanks. The wood is maple flooring I tore out of a house this past fall and a small piece of walnut out of the scrap bin at my local lumber yard. Total expense= $0. I hope I do it justice.
You tore out birdseye maple flooring?
Perhaps its just the Yank argot that's shocking - "tore out". The King meant "carefully removed redundant flooring planks for re-purposing into beautiful wooden objects that preserve and enhance the fine material". :-)
Butler trays traditionally have through-holes of curved hand & finger shape as the handles. To be fully-butler, they should also have flop-down hinged sides so that the tray becomes a table top when placed on a matching stand. So that's just "a tray" albeit very nicely made of the rescued birdseye.
There are variations without the flop-down sides but the floppers are the original concept. They look rather like campaign furniture, as the stands they go on to make a table are often fold-away.
Most tray designs seem to eschew added handles in favour of something integrated into the tray itself as the bits to grasp. I've just made one from an FWW article (May/June 2018 issue). I'm about to start the second smaller-inner tray of the pair today. The handles will be wraps of leather string.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2018/03/20/stylish-serving-trays
Mine are black walnut rescued from the scrap pile of a first & second fix business that makes stairs, windows, doors et al of the up-market kind. The scrap normally feeds a vast wood-burning shop heater! How could they!!?
Lataxe, long time wood saviour of the wrecking mens' detritus.
Used to be a lot of birdseye maple used as flooring. Too spendy now; I wish I could find a place that wanted to get rid of it to me!
I worked in a plant that processed 1,000,000 bd ft of hard sap maple per year and we considered birds eye and curly for drawers sides or other hidden component !
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