Thread: A nerve wracking box

hi all, it has taken me over a year and I have made this box three times over in my pursuit of perfection... well, my kind of perfection anyway. You need to know when to walk away

Nerve wracking? Well, as you get closer and closer to the end, with a huge time and emotional investment, you know that one mistake can ruin all your good work... doing stringing rebates for the lid on the router table, trimming with a chisel, one lapse in attention, or even dropping it when oiling as the final step - it all makes for a pretty nerve wracking time. I suppose as you get more experienced and confident in what you are doing, this stress will ease off.

Much of the work on this box is a first time effort, with no prior experience, as detailed with each picture below. The box is made out of jarrah with mitre joints and a northern silky oak veneered lid that I made :

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The lid is full of first time efforts. Firstly the lid is 1mm silky oak resawn on the bandsaw from a board and epoxied to both sides of a 6mm piece of plywood. Used a press made out of heavy laminated plywood, a strong steel frame, and a car jack.

The aim here was to have a perfect drop-in rectangular piece without any expansion worries. After doing the rebate around the top of the box, then cutting the lid panel to size, three sides fitted perfectly, while the 4th narrow side left a 0.25 - 0.4mm gap, which I found unacceptable.

So I decided on some first time stringing, making up some Queen Ebony stringing 3mm wide ( from a board from the Solomon Islands) , and rebating a space around the perimeter of the veneered panel. After a couple of goes the rebate worked out satisfactorily, and fitted the stringing OK with a little Japanese saw and 45 deg bench hook.

I thought the top looked a bit bland, so decided to have a go at adding an inlay motif, another first time effort using templates and router template guides to cut a 28 x 28 x 0.5 recess for the purchased motif. Still not sure if it adds anything to the appearance of the box.


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With a resawn jarrah board and using mitre joints and some very careful 45 degree cross cutting, it is possible to make continuous grain all the way around the box

Also had a go for the first time at making keys to strengthen the mitre joints using Qld Silver Ash as a key. Made a key slot cutting jig, and cut the keys from a Silver Ash board, sanded to an exact match thickness. Cut the protruding keys with the small Japanese saw flush with the sides - turned out well.

Only problem was with the finishing the keys lost their brightness, and ended up looking a bit scungy I thought - most likely through the sanding dust of the jarrah getting in the key end grain and the key end grain darkening with the oil finish




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Thought the box needed something else, so decided to add, at this late stage, a Silver Ash tray made from 6mm thick board. Made some jarrah end supports 6mm thick and epoxied to the end of the box.

With 10mm wide box sides, I was forced to use 6 x35mm leaf hinges of brass polished steel. These are of much poorer quality compared to the well engineered SmartHinge. Only problem the hinges can be up to 6.2mm wide, so did not fit the rebate done by a 6.0mm router bit, requiring some very fine filing of the four inner lips to allow the hinges to fit. Because of the poor quality of the hinge, it was hard to align the lid and the box, and I was a tiny bit out. Ended up bevelling the top of the box and the lid faces so the misalignment is not obvious. Not recommended by the purists, and I agree, but I didn't have much choice here after several attempts.


Finished the lot with Kunos #244 oil unthinned ( I forgot to thin it, as recommended by the Bungendore Woodworks gallery)

The red lining is adhesive backed felt from Spotlight on 10 ply cardboard from the newsagent and cut with a very sharp marking knife which leaves a single straight edge, not bevelled on both sides.

It has been a great experience which should help enormously with future projects. I appreciate the advice, help and encouragement given for the various problems I encountered, as written in various other threads, but it all came together nicely in the end.

The box is a gift for friends in WA who spent a week taking us around the SW corner of WA when the wildflowers were in bloom