Candle Box

If it gets any prettier you’ll go blind!. mike

-- Mike. mwurm13@yahoo.com

Hi HokieMojo;

This is very pretty. Your wife must love it.

Great work.

Lee

-- by Lee A. Jesberger http://www.prowoodworkingtips.com http://www.ezee-feed.com

Looks nice. I just just cut those stupid little brass screws with metal nippers and put a little epoxy in the hole if it is too loose.

-- Check out my new website! http://www.blakeweberwoodworking.com

I like that idea Blake. I “kind of” did that with the blanket chest I made. Before I saw the posting about driving brass screws, I twisted the head off a few. Since I didn’t figure I needed them to be structurally sound, I just wood glued the heads in place to fill the gap. They will probably pop out in time though. I like the epoxy idea though. That would hold. Thanks for the comments guys.

Very nice looking!

-- Gary, East TX -- The longest journey begins with a single step.

This is a beautiful box. I like the padauk and cherry combination.

Thanks for the post.

-- With God's help all things are possible- even woodworking. Woodworking is not just a hobby, it is an (expletive deleted) expensive hobby.

Great looking box.

-- My favorite piece is my last one, my best piece is my next one.

Nice wood selection.

-- Charlie M. "Woodworking - patience = firewood"

A very nice box for candles.
Sharad

-- patanjali

very nice box.

are the dovetail keys made using the kehoe jig, or some other method… if another method, how did you do it? I’m thinking of using reinforced miters for a bookshelf, but havent set on a way to do it yet.

Aaron,
Thanks for asking. What I actually did was take a 2×4 and cut it with my mitre saw so that I could make a router table jig. I’ll see if I can post a picture later. Do you have a router table? If so, this is super easy.

yup, i’ve got a router table… still completely in the dark about how you did it though! pics would be awesome.

but is it basically this sort of joint: http://www.dovetailspline.com/ – where the dovetail is a spline through the miter?

well, now i need to get the pictures i have loaded up here. I probably won’t get to it until this weekend, but I’ll try to answer your question in the meantime. in the link you sent, you can see how the box fits into a groove right? well, instead of moving the router on the jig like in your example, I put the jig on the router table and move it. I basically took a 2×4 and cut it on the mitres saw at 45 degrees. then i flip one of the pices over so that the board forms a V shape:
l —————-\ . .. . /——————-
. . . . . . . . . . \ .. /
l———————V———————-l

Imagine that the V in the picture is at 90 degrees. then I just glued and screwed a couple small strips of scrap plywood to the side of the 2×4 and to the bottom to hold the pieces together as one unit. finally, I lower the jig onto a router table with a dovetail bit on it to make a plunge cut. I slide the jig forward along the fence until it cuts the box (held in place by hand presseure alone, so be sure your fingers are free and clear). then I slowly lift up on the jig at the end of the cut. I think my explanation might be pretty confusing, but I’ll still try to post my pictures this weekend if I can get a few free minutes. I hope this helps some in the meantime though.

my line art looks ugly because the website keeps trying to change what i post when i use underlines and stuff. I think this attempt was a bit of a failure. If you can imagine the picture without the ”.”s, that might help.

yeah, i see what you mean. Better to do it this way (on the table) for small pieces like yours.

so how did you make the “key” part?

Hah, thats a good question. I almost lost a finger doing this after forgetting the timeless rule” “never feed material between the bit and the fence”. I did this and it pulled the piece right out of my hand and sent it accross the room like an arrow.

After that, I composed myself and I went back and did this right. Since I wanted the angles to match, I just left the same dovetail bit in place on the router table. I ripped a 2 ft piece of scrap (you can make all your splines at once if you have enough length) to a width just a 1/16th of an inch wider than my dovetail that I cut on the box. Then I just sent it accross the router table on each side.

I don’t think there is a real need to thickness the piece first. In fact, I’d recomend against it unless your spline is more than twice as thick as your dovetail. your goal is to basically have a piece shaped like a triangle after routing the two sides. Once the triangle shaped strip was made, I just kept planing one side with a block plane until the piece slid into the dovetail recess that I had cut. then I’d add some glue to the piece and tapped it snuggly into place and wiped off the excess glue.

Once the glue dries, you can just remove it with a flush cutting saw. Since i didn’t have one of these at the time though, I actually used a regulare saw and cut close to the joint, but nut quite flush. Then clamped a belt sande upside down on my bench and removed the excess material that way.

gotcha. that’s pretty much exactly the same as the kehoe jig, just self made and on the table. i like it. I think I’ll use this in the future, since it’s pretty and strong – and easy, it seems. thanks for the help.

Aaron,
Not sure if this will help, but here are some photos of the simple jig I made. A picture is worth a thousand words, so hopefully this will explain better than I ever could.

The first couple pics are from the top. The bottom shows the stips of ply that I used to hold the two 2×4 sections together.

excellent, thanks! i love how simple this is and how great (looking and strength-wise) the results are.

glad i could help. send me a message if you end up making something using my ideas. I’d love to see how you tackle the project.

Very nice Box

-- Jim, Kentucky