Thread: Octobox1 The prototype

In view of Rocker making an octobox, I decided to post my first atempt at one. This post is mostly about the lid and what happened with the design. If you saw the pictures of Octobox2, you will see I was going to try the same design of lid. What happened with Octobox1 was the reason the lid design was changed. The first 2 pictures show it after cutting my fingers. Pictures 003-004 show the box with the bottom and the first glue up of my lid. This is where things went wrong. First thing that happened was my angle for my cuts was off just a kangaroo hair. When I glued up the 2 halves, I had to cut one edge to make the two halves fit together. This caused the points to not all line up nicely in the middle as shown in pictures 006-007. On Octobox2 I carefully fit each piece with a handplane so the points all lined up. Picture 010 shows the outer banding being put on and 011-012 show the small cracks being filled. Now picture 013 shows what happened to this design. I was worried about wood movement but went for this design anyway. Picture 013 was taken one day after the box was moved from the garage to the house. Each piece shrank just a bit and the weak glue joint split open about 1/8". This box has since been moved to my office and has finally stopped shrinking with the damage being a 3/16" gap and some of the outer trim being split off the main body a teeny bit in places. On octobox2 I had made the panel thinner and was going to make a frame and panel lid out of it, but when I saw what happened to this lid, I took the Walnut one for octobox2 and put it one my window sill. I supose I could have glued it to a piece of plywood but the box was to important to me to risk a design error. The Walnut lid was made in Feb. of this year. It stayed perfect until about July. Then it slowly split open over the course of a few months to a gap of about 1/16". It has since closed back up. I guess it is a humidty meter now for my shop. Anyway, there was talk of a domed lid for Rockers box and I wanted to show my experiance with a multiple piece lid. Maybe you all can come up with ideas on how this design would work.

Pictures can be seen at http://www.thedragonslair.com