My daughter Tracey requested a food serving tray and sent me a picture of one that she had in mind. Turns out it was very close to the fruit bowls that I made a few months ago, so I told her she could have the extra one. But she had two requests after looking at the one I had: first she didn't want the full radius at the top and second, she wanted some slots that she could put her fingers into so she could carry it. I told her no problem that I could modify it to her liking.

Modification Time

Here is the fruit bowl I made awhile back and now it's time to implement some changes to it.
 

I thought that I could take off small amounts of material on my router table but quickly found out that wasn't a good idea. I placed some shims under the area that I cut so the bowl would still sit flat however that didn't work very well.
 

I started thinking of ways to remove this radius and decided to use my table saw. I clamped a large piece of MDF to the fence and then used a smaller clamp as my work stop (arrow). Then I slid the bowl into the saw blade nice and slow until it hit my work stop. At that point I have one hand placed inside the bowl putting pressure towards the fence and rotating the bowl with my other hand. I only took about half a blade width each time and after about four cuts I had a nice flat surface. This worked fine but was very scary because of how close my hand was to the blade.
 

Modification Time Continued

I had some burn marks on the maple because of how slow I was rotating my work piece but those disappeared quickly with my DA sander.
 

Here I'm laying out for my two slots. First I put lines in the middle, then I put a line at both ends of my slots. Once the wood had lines in them, I ran my pencil over them so I could see them better.
 

To cut these slots, I had to arrange my milling machine so I could hang my work piece over the edge of the table. Notice the head is turned and the ram is extended outward as far as I could get it. This was just enough so I could get to my work piece.