Present for Louis

Louis has been complaining for a while now. It all started after I replaced our carpet with bamboo flooring. The new floor is smooth and slippery, and has made one of his favorite activities much too hard. Here's a shot of the problem:

See how those scratchers aren't lined up properly? That will never do! Louis is a persnickity cat!

So finally, after months of protest, I have fixed the problem for him:

Does he approve? Yes!
Does he still complain? Yes! "What took you so long?"

It's just a simple tray with rabbeted and pegged corner joints, plywood bottom trapped in grooves, and mitered, applied moulding. The moulding was nailed and glued. After the glue dried I sunk the nails even further, drilled out the nail holes down to the heads, and then plugged the holes with dowels (bamboo skewers actually).

To hold things steady while I cleaned up the pegs I used a system of batten and wedges with my bench dogs. Here's a picture of the dog and batten on one side (other end of batten is clamped to back of bench with a hand clamp):

And here is the other side, with double wedges:

To adjust for the shorter dimension of the tray, I added a piece of scrap:

The only problem now, is that Louis is even less inclined to share with his brother Gerald...