Finished leather valet tray with brass-riveted corners holding a watch and keys.
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A Leather Valet Tray

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

One flat piece of leather, four corners, and a place for the keys to land.

A leather valet tray is a box that gave up its lid: one flat piece of vegetable-tanned leather, cut to a pattern, with its four corners pulled up and fixed so the sides stand. It catches keys, a watch, coins, the folded receipt you meant to throw out. Nobody asks much of it. That makes it one of the best first projects on the bench, because every mistake you make on a tray shows up in plain sight and costs you one piece of leather, not a briefcase.

Video: How to Make a Simple Wet Formed Leather Box | Beginner Tutorial, from Weaver Leather Supply on YouTube.

What a tray has to do

Stand up, stay square, and not scratch the watch.

Hands clamping and holding the corner of a leather valet tray before punching rivet holes.

Three jobs, and the leather has to do all of them by itself. The sides have to stand without slumping. The corners have to hold against the leather, which remembers being flat and wants to go back. The floor has to be smooth enough that whatever you drop in it comes out the way it went in.

Every way of making a tray is an answer to the second job. A pattern from MAKESUPPLY, their simple valet tray template, boxes the corners with a fastener: copper rivets for a tray that stays put, or button studs and snap fasteners for one that can come apart and lie flat in a drawer or a suitcase. Remodelista’s DIY leather storage tray takes the plain road, punching each squeezed corner and setting solid brass double cap rivets through it. Weaver Leather Supply’s wet formed leather box, shown on video by Chuck Dorsett, wets the leather and shapes it so the corners and edges take a structure of their own, then finishes with conchos.

Riveted, snapped or molded. Each one is a different bet on how the leather will behave a year from now.

The materials list

The tray is a small part, so it comes from the part of the hide made for small parts.

The MAKESUPPLY page gives two weights for its tray. A single-layer tray wants about 7 to 8 oz. leather. A two-layer stitched version wants something thin, under 5 oz., and their examples used 3 to 4 oz. natural veg tan from Wickett & Craig. Weaver’s box uses 4 to 5 oz. vegetable-tanned leather. Weaver’s leather thickness page puts one ounce at 1/64 of an inch, so the gap between a 4 oz. tray and an 8 oz. tray is about a sixteenth of an inch, which is the difference between a tray that folds and one that fights you.

For a briefcase I use only the bend, where the fiber is tightest. The shoulder goes to small parts. A tray is a small part, and a clean piece of shoulder suits it fine.

The list, from the MAKESUPPLY, Remodelista and Weaver builds:

  • Vegetable-tanned leather: 7 to 8 oz. for a single layer, or two layers of 3 to 4 oz. stitched together
  • Pattern paper or card, a steel ruler, a scratch awl and a sharp knife
  • A hole punch sized to the post of the rivet or snap you choose
  • Solid brass double cap rivets or copper rivets, or snaps and a setter, or button studs
  • A rawhide mallet and four small spring clamps
  • An edge beveler, sandpaper and a slicker
  • Beeswax or conditioner and clean cloths

The tray may also be molded. Buckleguy sells a plywood wet mold for a 7 by 5 inch tray in two versions, sized for 6.5 oz. or 12 oz. veg tan, and says it will fit nothing heavier than 12 oz.

Cutting and boxing a riveted tray

Four corners, four arguments with the leather.

Macro view of a riveted corner and burnished edge on a leather valet tray.

Print or draw the pattern at full size. MAKESUPPLY warns to print its PDF at 100% scale, and a tray drawn by hand needs the same care: measure the floor, add the height of the wall on every side, and square every line off one straight edge. Trace it onto the grain side with the awl.

Cut the outline with one long, committed pass where you can. A tray edge stays in plain sight forever, and every hesitation in the knife leaves a step you will have to sand out later.

Bevel the outside edges before the tray goes three-dimensional. It is far easier to run a beveler down a flat edge on the bench than up the wall of a box.

Mark the holes next. Remodelista’s method marks eight holes with a pencil and ruler so every corner lines up in the same spot, then squeezes each corner’s edges together and punches through both layers at once. MAKESUPPLY’s note on punching is short and right: use the punch that suits the post of your rivet or fastener. Test it on a scrap of the same leather before you touch the tray.

Before you punch, Remodelista suggests clamping the walls up with small spring clamps, which form the edges and hold each corner closed while the punch goes through both layers. Simple enough. Put a scrap of leather between each jaw and the grain.

Set the rivets. If you go with snaps, Weaver’s guide to setting a 4-piece snap has the one measurement that matters: on 3 mm leather, about a millimeter of the cap post should show through before you peen it over the socket. Weaver’s point is that the post needs a little metal left over to peen down, and a scrap test tells you whether your snaps and your leather agree.

I rank rivets, and copper sits high for strength and low for looks. It is strong. To my eye it is also too ugly for my bench. On a tray, where the corner hardware is the only jewelry the thing wears, pick the metal you want to look at every morning.

Where heavy bridle works against you

I would cut a briefcase from the stiffest leather I can get, and a tray is where that habit goes wrong.

My trade runs on heavy English bridle. My Leather Choices page calls it traditionally very waxy, thick, heavy and stiff, a leather that takes a while to soften. Those are the reasons it makes a briefcase that stands on its own for decades. So the reflex says: build the tray from the same stuff, and the corners will stand like a briefcase gusset.

Here is the problem. A tray corner does not want a leather that resists. It wants one that gives, folds, and then stays. Buckleguy’s molding instructions say bridles and other finished leathers may take longer to soak, which is what you would expect from leather packed with wax. Weaver’s folded box uses 4 to 5 oz. plain vegetable-tanned leather, not harness or bridle. And MAKESUPPLY tops its single-layer weight at 7 to 8 oz., well under the thick bridle that goes into a heavy briefcase.

So the reflex loses. My bet is that the wax that keeps a briefcase panel crisp keeps a tray corner springing back against its rivet. For a first tray, cut plain veg tan in the weights the patterns give.

What that costs you is the bloom. The Leather Choices page describes how English bridle’s waxes rise to the surface as a haze in drier air, and how you buff it out with a cloth and oil conditioner. A plain veg tan tray will never do that. It will darken instead. I can live with that trade, though not happily.

For a molded tray, Buckleguy’s steps are plain: cut the leather about 1.5 to 2 inches wider than the tray, soak it in warm water for 5 to 10 minutes or until fully saturated, press it between the inner and outer mold, clamp the outer mold to the base, and leave it 24 hours to dry. No rivets, no snaps. The corner is the leather itself, set into shape the way a wet felt hat sets on a block. Then the next morning you find out whether you were patient enough.

Finishing the edges and the floor

The tray sits on a dresser for years, and every inch of it stays in plain sight.

Workbench with a flat leather valet tray blank, a plywood wet mold and hand tools.

The edges get burnished. I hand-burnish for tradition on everything I make, and a tray is a good place to learn it because the edges are short and straight. Bevel, sand lightly, wet the edge, and rub with a slicker until the fibers lie down and the surface goes hard and glassy. Some makers rub beeswax into the edge for the final pass.

The floor is where the tray lives or dies. Keys scratch. Coins drag, and a watch case set down wet or warm every night for a year leaves its ring. Vegetable-tanned leather takes all of that as a record rather than damage. Undyed veg tan darkens with sun and with oil from your hands, and a tray that sits by a window will change color faster than one in a drawer.

Feed it like any other piece. The method on my Leather Care page is conditioner on a clean cloth, rubbed in briskly, left to sit, then the excess buffed off with a dry cloth. I use beef tallow and leather oil as conditioners myself. The same page says no conditioner is waterproof, so a wet glass set on the tray will spot it, and the spot should be wiped off at once. With time those spots fade as the leather patinas.

A tray is also about the only leather piece you never handle much. That changes how it ages. A briefcase handle darkens in the shape of a palm. A tray floor darkens in the shape of what you empty into it every night, the outline of a wallet, the circle of a watch, the scuffs from a ring of keys dropped one too many times from too high up.

That is the whole appeal, and the reason I would rather make one than buy one. Every Marcellino piece is made by one person, as The Maker page puts it, and a tray is a small, honest way to find out whether that person is you.

Leather Carving Hammer Mallet: A nylon-headed mallet with a wooden handle for striking chisels. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Tandy Leather Snap-All Snap Setter Set: A setter set for installing snap fasteners in leather. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

400 Sets Double Cap Leather Rivets, 9x10mm: A box of 400 double-cap rivet sets. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Dritz 750T Double-Cap Rivet Tools: A metal rivet setter and anvil set for double-cap rivets. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

OWDEN 9 Pieces Leather Hollow Punch Set: A nine-piece hollow punch set for round holes. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

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Sources

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