Thread: Two veneered boxes

After my first trial in veneering about a year ago, the box had disintegrated into the components. (here is an old picture of the box when it was new) http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B327.jpg

The veneer of the lower part of the box had striped of, due to failures in glueing, but the cover was still o.k. The box was used by my wife for preserving her make-up things and she said that she needed a replacement. So I used the box in my workshop for keeping screws and other small parts.

Nice box for keeping screws isn't ist

But my wife missed a box for keeping her things. Coincidental her birthday was near and so I decided to build a new box for her. In the workshop I recovered my veneer collection which I had not used since the build of the last box. http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B329.jpg http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B325.jpg I found an old plywood box with a cover and so the box needed "only" to be veneered. And of course new feet were needed too.

My first idea was to veneer the initials of my wife ( H F ) onto the cover. The rest should be a simple, geometric pattern like on the old box because in veneering I am an absolute beginner. My wife has the vary uncommon name HELIA. That is the female form of the Greek name HELIOS which is the god of the sun. I tried to reference to this meaning by pointing with the sunbeams to the initials of her name. This can be seen in the left part of the veneer: http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6308.jpg

For the feet I glued a padauk band together with an aluminium bar. Unfortunately the alu bar was 25 mm and the wooden band only 20mm. In an older thread in this forum I learned that you can plane alu. So I carefully planed the overlapping alu to get the base material for producing the feet. The only disadvantage when planning aluminium is that you need to clean the bottom of your hand plane after use.

Here you can see the feet in the side view. http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6309.jpg Here is a view of the open box: http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6310.jpg The decorative battens I did not produced myself. These were bought a year ago via the internet from a Spanish company. I still own some meter of this strings and so they were integrated in this work.

The most time consuming work was the finish with schellack. Although I used a ready made schellack lotion from the local store, I needed more than two days to prepare the finish. Painting - 4 to 5 hours waiting for hardening - polish with steel wool and this repeating 5 to 6 times takes a lot of time.

But when my wife told me that she liked the box, I knew that time and effort was not in vain.

After finishing the birthday present for my wife I decided to restore the old box too. I found it was a pity to use a box for keeping nails and screws in which I had invested so much time. I used the belt grinder to remove all veneer from the lower part of the box and removed the feet too. After this I veneered the box with burl wood, used similar feet as with the first box and finished it agin with schellack. The cover remained how it was. It got just a new finish. Here is the restored box: http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6311.jpg

The inner side of the box will be covered with green felt. Here http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6312.jpg is a glimpse how it will look when it is finshed. For the inner side of the cover http://hw.roesch.de/Bilder/B6313.jpg I used burl wood too. As you can see here, I am a beginner in veneering. The gap in the bookmarked veneer can be seen very clearly. But at least I can say my capability in veneering slowly gets better.

The restored box will now no longer be used for nails and screws in the workshop. I will give it to a good friend of us and hope they wil appreciate it.

Greetings

Detlef