Australian/USA Keepsake Box

With this box the main thing I had in mind was to use woods that are indigenous to the USA and Australia. The reason is that this box was to be a gift for one of my sisters. This one happens to live in Australia with her family. Her husband was born and raised in Australia, and I wanted this box to symbolize their marriage by kind of “joining the heritage of each of them…in wood”. When I sent this to her it took 8 weeks to get there and was pretty expensive to ship, especially since I insured it for quite a bit.

This box is approximately 10.5 inches by 7.5 inches by 3 ¾. The front and back are lacewood and sides are birdseye maple. Lacewood grows in Australia, but I’m not sure if this piece actually came from Australia. It can’t be seen from these pictures, but it has an incredible 3D effect as light angles change. The box joints were done with a jig and router. This is one of those boxes where I glued up the sides of the box, then joined the top and bottom to the carcass, then sawed it in two. In sawing it in half, I wanted to take as thin a kerf as possible. I noticed that the 6.5 inch blades for my battery powered skill saw has a 1/16 inch kerf, the same arbor as my table saw, and a slightly higher rpm then my table saw, so I decided I could use it on my table saw to cut the box apart. It work perfectly, and removed very little wood.

The top is framed in walnut and the panel is eucalyptus. It actually did come from Australia. A few years back, the owner of a local lumberyard had taken a vacation/business trip to Australia and had a pretty significant load of eucalyptus sent over here to the states. He was selling it for flooring. I kind of liked the idea that a piece of wood that is grown in Australia, is shipped here, and then sent back as part of this box. The frame uses simple miter joints and is rounded over on the outside edge, however it is also rabbeted into the sides.

The eucalyptus panel is joined to the walnut by tongue and groove on all four sides. The top edges of the eucalyptus were rounded over slightly to “set it off” a little from inside of the frame.

The pattern for the scrollwork in the top was hand drawn from looking at a pattern in a catalog…guess I’m too cheap to “spring” for the pattern. It’s a little crude, but that’s OK…my sister loved it, and the box.

The finish started with a sealer coat followed by 10 coats of satin oil/poly blend, with progressively finer sanding after every few coats. Behlen’s polish was used after a final sanding at 1500 grit.

It was very gratifying to hear how much she appreciated getting this in the mail one day.

-- Martin, Kansas