I couple years ago I picked up some of these “Type trays”(used in the old printing industry to hold little slugs of type with letters on them) As that is old school and very few printers use this any more the type and storage trays have become obsolete. But the trays do make need display frames. This is one I did this to.
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You can see it is beat up and nasty looking. The plywood bottom was delaminating and falling apart. So I removed it. You need to do this anyway to do a good job painting.
You can see how bad the wood was. So now I moved on to cleaning the tray. Primered and painted it.
I chose to use a dark Gray for this. If you want you can trim off the legs. I chose to keep them.
Next I found some 1/4 inch plywood, trimmed it to fit the bottom replacing the old damaged plywood.
I then sat the tray on it and marked the openings for reference.
Then I made color copy’s of a bunch of things, Dash plaques, Cloth patches and photos that I thought would look cool.
I then cut them out and made a preliminary arrangement using the grid pattern from the tray for reference.
Using this contact cement I glued the pictures down.
and this is what that looked like.
I then attached it back to the tray, Wow!
I then hung it on my office wall and started to load it up.
Up close…
Re-purposing at its best!
