Yesterday, my son and I got started on building his box.  We cut the side pieces to length and mitered the ends.  I showed him how to adjust the angle of the blade and how to use a sacrifice fence to bury the tip of the blade while cutting the miters.  

We also cut a grove in each side piece to accommodate the ¼” plywood bottom.  This gave my son a chance to learn a little about dado blades and making adjustments to the width of the cut using shims.  Lastly we cut the plywood bottom to size and did a quick dry fit of all of the pieces so far, so good.

Today went to Austin Hardwoods in Santa Ana, CA.  The last time I was there they had some thin off-cuts of Gaboon Ebony that they were selling rather cheaply.  I wish I had bought some then because there was none of them to be seen today.  Today they had off-cuts of Mexican Ebony.  My son picked through the little barrel of pieces and found a few that were close enough in color to the Gaboon to work in spline-thin sizes.  The piece we decided on was about ½” X 1” and about 18’ long; wide enough for the splines and thick enough to be re-sawn.

I know we could have used walnut and it probably would have looked close enough.  But, we wanted the contrast of the ebony against the oak and I have never worked with ebony before so for less than $3.00, I thought we could give it a try.  We looked at hinges at Austin Hardwoods but didn’t find what we were looking for.  Next stop was Rockler in Orange, CA.  They had quadrant hinges that looked decent enough and are inexpensive enough for a practice project.

Edit 7/1/2011:  My son had too many things going on getting ready to leave for college to do any more on the box.  We had to put the box on hold until one of his future trips home.  I'll update this series as we make progress.

Sharing sawdust,

My youngest son will be moving off to college in a couple of weeks.  The other day he mentioned that he wanted to learn something about woodworking before he left.  Thinking about where to begin teaching him woodworking, we decided that building a box would be a good place to start. 

We began by searching for a design, one that he liked and wouldn’t be too complicated.  On LumberJocks.com, we found this two-tone oak box made by Eric (also known as “Woodwrecker”).  The design looked like it would meet our needs and yesterday we started our project by cutting to width the pieces for the sides from some old shelves made of edge-glued red oak. 

The shelves had been decommissioned many years ago and sat around for a several years because I couldn’t decide what to do with the built-up boards.  A few years ago I checked them and found that they had warped slightly.  I decided to planed them flat again and wait to see if they continued to move.  I still didn’t know what I wanted to use them for so they sat around again until this week.  They haven’t moved appreciably so I feel that they are reasonably stable and will make for a good practice box.

After cutting the side pieces to width, we had some off-cuts that we used to practice cutting miters.  As you can see here, they came out pretty well.  Today we’ll cut the side pieces to length, miter them and cut the grove for the plywood bottom.

Happy woodworking,

undefined: undefined »