Thread: Kitchen Utensil box

The joints were a bit too tight.

It took a bit of work to get all the fingers together.

Only one chipped off surprisingly.

They were about half a mm over long - intentionally.

This and the tight fit made it difficult pulling the joints home.

Any suggestions?

I used the dado to cut a groove for the base. This leaves a gap on each side.
I cut little pieces to fill the gap.
Then I sanded and hot glue-filled the gaps on some of the joints.

The feet and top-front were routed from a template.

Sanded to 400 grit and finished with Livos Kunos oil.

Overall I was satisfied with my first attempt at box joints and the Dado blades.

I quite like the simple but elegant design. Well done.

Thanks Garell, good to get a comment.

It is a simple design and there is probably too much effort in making the box joints than this project deserves.
Basic butt joints would have been adequate.

I was pleased to get the jig and dado to cut fairly accurate box joints.

Now I can look to use it on better projects.

Originally Posted by Scally

It took a bit of work to get all the fingers together. Only one chipped off surprisingly.
...
Any suggestions?

I'm not surprised that one of the fingers broke off. I'm amazed that more of them didn't break, since with the fingers oriented as you have them here you have lots of short grain pieces, which are easy to snap off. Did you think of orienting the grain horizontally instead of vertically so you get stronger fingers?

You are spot on.

I didn't like the idea of the grain running across the tall box. So I thought I would see how it went.

Once I tried routing dovetails across the grain on a thin jarrah board. The first time I touched the jarrah with the router bit , the board smashed. I needed a backing board and a board in front to create a sandwich for the jarrah to avoid the board splitting or shattering.
So I knew I had to be careful.

That was part of the reason for cutting the four sides at once- effectively each was a backing board for the other.

Since the dado blade was new, it was nice and sharp. This would help.

Each cut if small , 6mm wide by 10mm deep, so it didn't put a lot of tension on the boards.

Cedar is soft and not as brittle as other timbers, like jarrah.


And I was lucky.

Next time I will try box cuts on the end grain. You don't want to test fate too often.

Hi Scally,
Like Zen, I'm amazed only one finger snapped.
As far as clamping and drawing the joints together, you might try running a file along the sides of each finger just once or twice to ease the tightness and I find these framer's clamps from Carbatec very useful. They fit around the fingers and pull the joints in nicely. They are cheap too. I have two but need some more.

Regards,

Rob

Originally Posted by Scally

I didn't like the idea of the grain running across the tall box.

I made a box of similar proportions (with the grain running up and down) using plain mitres. With no reinforcement, the long-grain to long-grain glue surfaces have been strong enough so far. It's used as a small container for kitchen scraps, with replacable UHT milk cartons as a liner.

To make the fingers a little easier to assemble, is there a way to add thin paper shims to your jig, so that a second series of cuts will make the fingers just a tad thinner?

For pulling the joints home, use ice-block sticks or something similar to pad up the low-lying fingers so they can be clamped directly. See the photos attached here, where I used the technique to glue up some dovetails. For your small fingers, shim maybe every three fingers, roughly, or to match the clamps you're using.

Rob, I do have two of those clamp.
They are handy for sensible boxes. Unfortunately the edges of mine are is 23cm long.

Filing the edges makes sense but I was too lazy to file that many fingers.

Zenwood, I am sure mitred joints would work fine although I find them a pain to clamp.

My jig is adjustable. Nothing very smart, yet, I loosen the bolts and can tap the spacing a 'hair'.
I should have done this but once I got a good fit I didn't want to loose it.
Once I work out how to add a fine adjustment bolt/thread, it should be easy to creep up or back off the fit. I just haven't worked out how to do this yet!

The glue lubricated the jpoint a bit.

You paddle pop stick would be tricky on my large number of small fingers but I do a similar thing with dovetail joints.

I have seen the Shaker guru Christen Beeksvort(?) use a soft timber like radiata over the dovetail. He just screws up the clamp and the soft pin compresses over the end grain and adds enough pressure to the face board joint.
I have done this too and it works.

On the box joints, I placed the Bessey clamps as close to the fingers as I could. This pulled the nearby joints pretty well but not thos away from the clamps. I tried F clamps over the open ones to pull them up.
The cedar was less than 10mm thick so the clamps bowed the sides. This opens the joint a bit on the outside.

It looks like I need a combination of methods for this type of join.
Maybe I could have cut half or three quarter inch MDF to fit between the fingers and the full length of the side. This might even the pressure and pull the joints home without deforming the sides of the box.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Very neat and nifty!!