Present's Boxes

[Leon]

So almost every year I give out wooden presents to friends and family.

This is what I am working on now.

I did some resawing, of a 4/4, 1x8, 12.5" long to get a 1/2" thick blank for box sides and 1/8" thick veneer for the tops and bottom surfaces. The veneers will be glued to a piece of 1/4" plywood for extra support.

This yields 8 sides for the tops and bottoms plus the veneers for tops and bottom pieces. The box sides start off at 3.25" tall and when completed the box will be approximately 2.75" tall.

I plan to so some inlay with contrasting wood for the box tops.

So after doing the resawing, cutting the sides to length, and gluing the veneer to the plywood panels, cutting groves, and rabbets I moved on to producing box joints.

It took me a while of trial and error "DRAWING" on Sketchup so that there would be no trial and error in the shop. The drawings worked out well for the build.

Look Ma! No template guide bushing.

The box joints freshly cut. Gotta love the Shaper Origin. Enter the width and thickness of the material, how deep, and how many total pins on both mating pieces and it does the math to create a pattern to follow. If you don't follow exactly, it corrects for you.

How all of this fits together.

Dry fit with out the tops and bottoms. Dry fit WITH the tops and bottoms. So the design was to eliminate the normal groove, to receive the top and bottom. that comes through one of the box joint pins and shows on the outside of the joint. The solution was to still have smaller 1/4" x

1/4" pins but with 1/2" thick material.

Tomorrow I'll attempt inlaying, again using the Shaper Origin, on the top veneer.