The acquired wood I mentioned on the main page had a decent looking grain so I thought I should make something that showed it off and a replacement trivet seemed like a good candidate. The old one was a rather inelegant square chunk of 3/4"-thick wood with screwed-on rubber feet so I decided to go with just a thin design based on another bamboo trivet we owned.

OK, so I might not have absolutely needed a plan for this one (and in truth I just traced the bamboo trivet for the outline) but I'll modestly mention that the shape of the handle hole was totally my own original design.

As mentioned, I started with a pile of donated wood. The trivet wasn't very big and it used only a couple of the planks shown here.

The planks I started with were about a foot long and around 3/4" thick. The top plank on the right has been cleaned off and run through the jointer to remove the finish and almost looks like birdseye maple.

I assume it was all one type of wood, but there was quite a bit of grain and color variation between the pieces.

To prevent the fate of the old trivet befalling this one (cracking, presumably due to seasonal expansion/contraction) I made this one using a 3-ply construction with the grain of the middle layer running at right angles to the top and bottom.

To start I flattened a couple planks on the jointer and ran them through the planer to clean off the finish and start with flat and parallel sides. Shown here is one of the planks after those operations.

The bandsaw was used to cut the plies, which ended up being just shy of 1/8" thick. I was able to get four thin pieces from a single plank. That was enough for the top and bottom, and then I needed another three pieces for the middle ply.

The pieces cut with the bandsaw were made thicker than needed and these were run through the planer to trim to a consistent thickness and remove the saw marks. Here is one of the pieces after that operation.

In this setup three of the thin pieces are being edge-glued together to form the middle ply. Since they are oriented with their short dimension covering the tall part of the trivet, I needed three of them rather than the two pieces that sufficed for the top and bottom.

The vertical clamps with the scrap wood ensure that the pieces are not offset vertically from each other.

Here the top ply consisting of two of the thin pieces has been completed. The plies were book matched so the grain pattern is largely symmetric on the two sides (or top and bottom in this rotated photo).

And for the non-woodworking-inclined, here is an illustration of book matching (done years ago for another project, but I wanted to get more use out of all those great wood-grain patterns I had to draw for this one).

So with the three plies all made and their facing sides smoothed off with the planer again, they were laminated and glued together. I used some MDF pieces in this setup to provide flat faces for the clamping and to help spread the clamp pressure evenly.

I've made plywood using epoxy in the past, but for the trivet I used my normal woodworking adhesive which is a polyvinyl acetate glue from Lee Valley Tools.

One of the reasons to go with a 3-ply construction was to help prevent warpage of the wood. However, after a day of glue drying time, the trivet had a pronounced warp equal to maybe 1/2 of the total thickness. I couldn't see any easy way of fixing that so I decided to hope that it was just due to the moisture in the glue and that it would eventually flatten out.

And in fact that turned out to be the case because the warp slowly got better over the course of 3 or 4 days until it was small enough to cease being a problem.

In this shot you can see the uneven edges of the laminated pieces. Here I'm marking the shape of the handle hole using carbon paper.

For the outside contours, I just traced our bamboo trivet onto the blank to get the shape and then cut it out with a bandsaw. Here the outline is being smoothed using a belt sander.

At this stage, the handle hole had already been drilled out and smoothed using a smallish sanding drum on a spindle sander.

One problem with making a book-matched piece is that the grain relative to the faces is opposite on the two halves as this drawing shows. The black planes extending out of the wood follow the grain direction. This difference becomes a problem if a bladed tool such as a planer is used (either power or manual). The blade moving against the upwards grain can gouge out small pieces, resulting in a poor surface finish. Blade movement in the direction of the green arrows is good, red is bad so obviously you can't do both sides at once and get a good result.

So as a result of thickness planing the two halves, one side had a poor finish (small gouges) and needed to be fixed.

Here the surface is being cleaned up with a cabinet scraper. The scraper is just a flat piece of metal with a tiny hook formed in one edge. It is drawn across the wood to scrape off a thin layer. But since it was hand-held and had a fairly small contact area, it could be used in the correct direction on each side of the trivet.

I just scraped off enough material to remove the surface roughness due to the planing.

And in this rather poorly-lit shot, the trivet is complete except for finishing.

Here is a close-up photo of the corner showing the three plies.

The finish has been applied in this photo. This is actually the second finishing round; the first was just a simple wax, but a steamy lid placed on the trivet made a permanent water stain. So the wax was removed and a varnish was applied. There is still the possibility of damaging the varnish with heat, so if that happens then I'll need to try another finish like an oil.

Here is the bamboo trivet used as a shape model and the new trivet side-by-side. Clearly evident is the highly innovative design of the handle hole on the new model.