Jewellery box for my mother-in-law

I received a brief for my mother-in-law’s Christmas present, a jewellery box designed to display necklace chains. Here is the finished result.

The main carcase is in brown oak with the plinth and crown in walnut. Small fittings are ebony. The door is beech framed with walnut and with walnut slips. It’s a plywood back rebated in. It’s not possible to see the hanging system, but this is made of hickory strips drilled and then cut on the bandsaw to make hooks, which seems to work ok. The finish is three coats of Danish oil rubbed down hard between.

The sections of this piece did not want to come square despite using a shooting board, but the glue up went reasonably ok. I was going to rout the plinth sections, but messed this up finally resorting to an old moulding plane of my Dad’s and then gradually planing the sections together (there was insufficient timber length to do the moulding and then cut the four lengths from one piece).

I’m most pleased with the timber choice, which I think has worked quite well. Perhaps the coarse grained oak and the fine grained beech don’t quite fit, but everything seems to like that walnut. This is the first time that I’ve used ebony and it felt good, almost like plastic.

The piece was meant to have surface pinned hinges, but this is Blackpool so I’ve yet to locate the pins. I fell back on some very nice butt hinges (Rutlands) but of course I’d glued up without cutting the mortises. The chisel and no 722 router plane just enabled me to work in these mortises and I think that the hinges look ok. Just try not to notice that the door edge got over planed getting it to fit.

Overall a tricky little job with several set backs, but all the more satisfying when it has come together at the end. There’s no guarantee that the mother-in-law will like it; an earlier job I did for her has been squandered. Hi ho – families eh!

-- Stanley generally struggling