This one was a little out of my table saw comfort zone, but it turned out to be quite tame and kinda cool. I have been tripping over a bunch of short cherry slabs and saw someone selling snack boards out of slab lumber with a built in dish to hold dip, or chips or whatever. But how to make the dish? I couldn't see trying to build a complicated router jig or balance a long board to spin outboard on the lathe to make the dish and don't have a CNC, so an internet search turned up a variety of methods to use a table saw to make coves, chair seats and even bowls. This method is a combination of some of those. I started with a 2' x 4' piece of cheapo 1/2" Borg plywood, marked the center of an arbitrary (just had to be wider than my slab) 16" circle and cut it out using a jig on the band saw. Taped a piece of thin cardboard around the cut out to make up for the width of the kerf and put the circle back in the piece. Then the whole thing was centered over top dead center of the 10" flat top grind table saw blade (lowered) with the outer portion clamped to the table. Using double sticky tape plus a cross piece hold down screwed into the circle, the roughly 1 1/2" thick natural edge cherry slab was attached to the circle upside down and centered where I wanted the dish.
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The spinning blade was raised until it touched the bottom of the plywood circle and the captive piece was slowly rotated a full turn. Cranked the blade up a little bit after each rotation until the cut went through the plywood into the cherry and the dish was about 1 1/4" deep. You can shut off the saw and pull the piece out to check the depth every few turns. The cut was very smooth and didn't take much sanding with a 3" sanding disc to get it smooth. You can tell by the little nub that I was a bit off estimating top dead center, but it wasn't much of a problem to chisel off and sand smooth....just like a bowl bottom.
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Ran both sides through the drum sander, softened all the edges, sanded to 220, slapped on a coat of Doctor's Woodshop Walnut Finishing Oil and voilą! A cool natural edge, avant-garde, neo rusticsnack platter for whatever you want to serve up. Both sides of the board are usable and when the walnut oil dries I'll put on a coat of the same walnut oil beeswax paste I use on my salad bowls and buff it to a nice soft luster. These will make great holiday gifts.
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