Trash to Treasure – Trivets

Trivets

This was another one of those “just trying to use up some scraps” project. I made these the next night after making my DIY kerfmaker and table saw jointing jig. Both jigs made this build possible. The first step was to chop up most of the longer stock that was leftovers from some of my breadboard builds. The final length of these ended up being 6″. Having never built a trivet I thought that was a sufficient length. I wish I would have made some that were 8″ however. With all the stock cut to length I used my jointing jig to make sure everything was nice and square. There was going to be a lot of dados so there needed to be a fair amount of accuracy when milling these pieces. The next step was to setup and cut dado after dado after dado after dado. This seriously took forever to do. Note that when you are using a potentially dangerous tool such as the table saw it is a good idea to take breaks occasionally when you have a lot of repetition involved. Sometimes we get carried away in the repetitive motions that we disregard safety. I ended up making 9 trivets but had 2 casualties. Oh well, it was just scrap. Seven survived. I put a 30 degree chamfer on the bottom to add a subtle feature to catch the eyes. They turned out better than I had expected. 56 pieces, 168 dados, and 336 movements across the blade. I used my scrap kerfmaker, re-cut to a 1/2” dado set, to cut the outside dados. Here are 2 videos covering the build. Thanks for watching.

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