First step was to try sawing one of the chunks into 7/16 boards for the sides. I had picked up an old Diston rip saw a couple of years ago and now was the time to try it out. I clamped the board in my vice and had at it, but in short order I realized it was time I tried my hand at sharpening a saw. On my last trip to LV I had picked up a file, but lacking a saw vice I had to clamp the blade between a couple of boards in my bench vice. I jointed it, and then had at it with the file. Things went OK at first, then went a little awry, but not too horrible. When I picked up the saw at the garage sale I also grabbed a saw set. I had no idea how much set to add, but I figured I’d leave the saw set adjusted as it was and give that a try. After my first attempt at sharpening it was time to try cutting the boards again. Wow, much faster now, although the saw marks were pretty bad. You can see in this photo that the kerf is very wide:

I sawed from the direction shown in the photo, then reversed the piece in the clamp to start in from the other end. After cutting off each slab I jointed the cut face of the thick board before cutting the next one off. After about 20 minutes I had this:

I then flattened one side of each board, then thicknessed one to 7/16”. I used that one as a reference when I thicknessed the others.

I marked out the lengths of the long and short sides of the box and cut the ends square, then shot them:

After jointing one edge on each board, I marked the other and jointed it:

So at the end of a couple of hours, here’s what I had this:

Man, a four day weekend and I hardly get time for this! I did sneak in the shop for an hour or so tonight though. Enough to shoot the mitred corners on the sides:

I had to make a decision about construction tonight and decided to go with the mitred corners and glue a plywood bottom into grooves cut in the sides. I kind of wanted to use all real wood, but heck, I’m going to use yellow glue so not exactly 18th century anyway and so plywood shouldn’t be all that bad Besides, I didn’t really want to deviate construction-wise from other boxes I’ve made that I know hold together well.

So out came the LV small plow to cut some grooves:

One of the best things about this project is this:

This is the display of my airborne particle counter. These readings are just slightly higher than what I get in the rest of the house, and I didn’t have the air cleaner on either. Considering I have had a LOT of dust in the shop lately due to cutting laminate, I believe some of the reading is just from me walking around in the shop.

I had to cut pieces for the lid frame but I didn’t want to lose quite as much material to the kerf as I did using my Diston rip saw so I gave my Japanese saw a try:

It worked very well and the kerf is about 1/3 that of the other saw. After some cutting and planing I had these:

For veneering the bottom panel for the box I decided to try hot hide glue for the first time but didn’t have a veneer hammer so quickly whipped this together from some scraps of birch and a strip of brass I had laying around:

And I didn’t have a glue pot but did snag this coffee warmer being thrown out from work a few months ago:

The gluing went fairly well, but I think it would have been better if I had used plywood for a substrate instead of some hardboard. The glue just didn’t seem to ‘grab’ as it cooled as much as I thought it would. At any rate I did manage to get it glued finally.

Then it was back to sawing pieces for the base from the chunks of mahogany I had:

After getting the bottom veneered and the sides mitered, it was time for glue up:

Now I wanted to reinforce the mitered corners with keys. I clamped on a guide I had kicking around (just a couple of pieces of MDF that I’ve used as a guide for several things):

And brought out the dovetail saw:

Here’s the cuts and the slot after removing waste with a small chisel:

I sawed some stock for the keys from a piece of hard maple I had and made a jig to plane the stock to a uniform 1/8”. Not sure how well this shows up:

Now for the base:

Again trying to do a base in much the same way as I’ve done others, but only with hand tools. This was the most disappointing stage so far. The initial plan was to clamp two sides of the base together, then use a brace and bit to bore holes between what would become the feet, then clean that up afterwards:

I had a LOT of trouble drilling these holes. I’d get so far and then the bit would just stop cutting. When I removed the bit I could see turnings jammed into the screw part of the bit and if I removed that and drilled some more it would cut for a little longer and then stop again. I tried sharpening the bit but that didn’t help. I’ve used this bit in other solid pieces of wood and it worked fine. I think the trouble was that no matter how tightly I clamped the two pieces together, the screw part (there’s gotta be a name for it?) would spread the two pieces apart so the screw threads wouldn’t grab and pull the bit in. I eventually got tired of this and moved on to plan B:

The fret saw worked quite well for this and I completed all of the cuts that would define the feet. Then I used my newly sharpened $2 backsaw to cut the waste into sections that could be snapped off with a screwdriver:

Unfortunately, the grain in the mahogany I used tended to tear once in a while rather than snap off cleanly. I cleaned the middle parts up as best I could with a chisel without removing too much wood and then scraped and rasped a bit too. These bottom sections are pretty rough looking (I’m not going to show you!) but hey, it’s the bottom – no one will be allowed to lift this box up except me :-)

Now for the lid:

I decided to make a lid with a floating panel in a frame with bridle joints at the corners. After carefully marking out the cut lines it was time once again to make use of Ed’s great dovetail saw:

And then my $2 backsaw followed by a chisel to remove the waste:

Continuing the construction of the top, it was time to do the tenons:

After a little tweaking with a shoulder plane, here was the final result:

I used my LV small plow to start a stopped groove on the inside of each piece, then had to use a combination of saw and chisels to finish up. I found a piece of hard maple for the panel and cut and squared it up on my shooting board, before flattening and smoothing it. I used the plow to cut a groove around the edge of this board to form the tongue that would fit into the stopped groove of the frame members.

After gluing the lid together, here’s the unfinished box:

And here it is after finishing and adding the dividers and tray and hinges:



I used some antique cherry aniline dye on the lid panel to bring out the little bit of figure that was there, then brushed several coats of amber shellac onto the whole project. I rubbed it out afterwards using steel wool and paste wax.

And since some of the tools were from bygone days, a theme pic:

Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoyed it. If anyone has any comments or critiques I’d be pleased to hear them.

Cheers,
Kerry

As I said in my project post for this table, part of the reason for putting this in a blog is so that some of you Lumberjocks with far more experience than I could have a peek at how I did this and maybe point out anything you think I could do differently/better when I build the second matching table. So feel free to post your criticisms – I’m here to learn.

The first thing I did was to make a full size template for the oval top. I knew I’d be needing a router template anyway, and having a full size drawing on the template would make preparing the different components much easier. Here’s the template at an early stage:

To lay out the oval on the particle board, I started with a central line drawn the length of what would be the final shape. I drew a line perpendicular to the lengthwise line at what will be the middle of the oval. After a little experimenting to arrive at the final size of the table top, I tapped two small nails into the board on the central lengthwise line at 12 ½” from the middle line. I made a loop of string 57” (I think? – might have to check my math) in circumference so that when it was placed over the nails and a pencil was used to stretch out the loop, it reached out to the desired size of the oval – 32”, and then used that to draw the oval. There are several good articles on the web explaining this – just search on “drawing ovals”. The important thing here is that the string does not stretch. I repeat – the string must me a material that does not stretch. Similarly, to draw sections of ovals that defined the outside and inside of the side apron, I replaced the nails at 11 ½” and 11 7/32” respectively as shown here:

I continued drawing components (legs, aprons, tenons) onto the template to aid in assembly and to help picture how the whole thing goes together. This picture for example shows how the tenons fit into mortises in the legs:

Now I taped a piece of blank paper to the template and – using nails in the same holes used to draw the apron onto the template, drew the outline of the apron onto the paper using the string used earlier:

I just happened to use the same paper on which I had earlier traced the form of the cabriole legs.

The next step was to glue up a bending form to be used to bend the veneers into the final shape of the side aprons. I used MDF and to make it slightly lighter and to use up some scraps, I alternated full size pieces with strips to leave open channels:

Using graphite tracing paper and the apron pattern I made earlier, I traced the outline of the apron onto the surface of the bending form block, and then cut the form on the bandsaw:

The surface undulations seen in this photo must be sanded smooth. I used a large sanding block – wood with sandpaper glued on with spray adhesive to ensure as fair a form as possible:

As I found out on an earlier project, if these band saw marks are not sanded out they WILL telegraph into the surface of the bent apron which will then need extensive sanding to smooth. Better to do the sanding once now in material that is easily sanded rather than spend more time sanding the hardwood aprons – making them thinner in the process. Once the form was sanded smooth, I used some packing tape to protect the MDF from moisture and glue during the bending process:

Now that the form was done, I used my full size drawing to determine the sizes of the pieces I’d need for the aprons and top, and selected what I felt were the best pieces of lumber from the cherry boards I had. Using my bandsaw I then cut one of the pieces that would become a side apron into veneers for bending. I found that cutting them 1/8” thick worked well. I did try a bit thicker, 3/16” for one side but it was much harder to bend and a small crack (with the grain) formed. I then put the veneers into my steam box and let them steam for about a half hour:

After removing the veneers from the steam box I quickly applied a coat of yellow glue to one side of each (except the last one). I then placed them between the two halves of the bending form and began to squeeze them together with clamps. I had earlier marked them so that I wouldn’t mix up their order while I did the gluing. Here’s a picture of one of the layups in the press:

After removing the apron from the press, I traced my pattern onto it and put together this jig to hold it while I cut the curves on the bandsaw, and later to cut the tenons on the table saw:

Once the bottom of the aprons were cut, I made up a scratch stock for putting a bead on the bottom edge of each apron:

Here it is in use:

And here’s some of the final results:

After I made the mortices in the legs (see below), it was time to cut tenons on the ends of the aprons. This is where the jig shown earlier, and it’s sister really shone:

With the aprons complete (except for the tenons which were actually cut after I made the mortices in the legs), it was time to turn to the legs. First step was to plan where to cut the legs from the 12/4 board to try to have the grain running from corner to corner. I then tilted my saw table to match one edge of one pair of legs:

I then flattened the freshly cut face with a jointer plane:

and then reset the table to 90° to cut the remaining three sides of the first pair of legs. I repeated this for the second pair. Afterwards I flattened and squared the stock before crosscutting each pair apart.

After spending some time trying to find the best orientation of each leg, I used a hardboard template to draw the shape of the leg on two adjacent faces of each blank:

At this point I made the mortices in the legs, before cutting the cabriole shape. Some I did by hand, and some with a hollow chisel morticer attachment on the drill press. No rhyme or reason as to which ones I did by hand and which by machine – I just got tired of chopping after a while and switched to the machine. It was actually at this point that I cut the tenons pictured above to fit the mortices. Then it was off to the band saw to cut the waste from these legs, trying to stay just outside the pencil lines. I don’t have any pictures of this, but afterwards here’s what I had:

In the photo above I’m beginning to add guide marks to aid in the rounding of the leg. The first step was to find the distance from the edge to the middle of the narrowest part, the ankle, and draw a line the same distance from the edge all the way up the leg. Then I drew another set of lines between these first lines and the edge, like so:

This line is a little closer to the first pencil line than the edge, but I don’t think it would have made much difference if it had been halfway between. The next step is to use a drawknife, chisel, or whatever to remove the corners down to these second lines, like so:

Next, I drew a line down the middle of the areas I just flattened:

The line is a little hard to see because of glare, but you can see part of it at the top and bottom of the photo. Now I removed the edges between these latest lines and the original ones, flattening an area about halfway between. Next, it was on to a spokeshave to continue removing ridges and smoothing the overall shape:

Since I don’t have a big enough lathe to turn the feet, I had to start by finding something to draw a circle for the pad on the bottom of each foot. This pill bottle did the trick:

Then I used a handsaw to cut into the top of the pad, down to the circle:

and then used a chisel to remove the waste all the way around the pad:

In order to guide stock removal in forming the foot, I cut a 2 ½” circle from a piece of cardboard and made some guide marks in from the corners of each foot:

and then cut off the three outside corners with a handsaw:

The round shape of the foot was then refined with a rasp:

After this, it was lots and lots of sanding and scraping and sanding and more sanding to arrive at the finished leg.