Jewelry Box

Very nice!

-- Paul, Texas

Looks like it should be able to take off and fly around the room. Beautiful woods and finish!

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

Real classy !!

-- -** You are never to old to set another goal or to dream a new dream ****************** Dick, & Barb Cain, Hibbing, MN. http://www.woodcarvingillustrated.com/gallery/member.php?uid=3627&protype=1

The box is sweet! The veneering is really good. That’s something I need to learn how to work with.

-- There are three types of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't!

how beautiful!!!!
LOVE the mixture of woods AND those feet. Oh yah!!

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

The combination of woods on this is just spectacular. The feet give it the illusion of floating. Very nice.

-- Max "Desperado", Salt Lake City, UT

Great looking box. Can you elaborate on the construction a little? Thanks.

-- ICN, Bill, (http://www.beavercreekfitness.com)

Very nice. This is unique (at least to me.)

Do you have plans that you could share?

-- Nicky

Beautiful. I’m sure your wife bragged about this to everyone she knows.

-- Jeff, St. Paul, MN

The woods are great and I really like the splines, the way they are accented so nicely. Beautiful piece. Bet your wife was thrilled. Here’s wishing you many more years together (to fill that baby up – LOL)

-- Better to say nothing and be thought the fool... then to speak and erase all doubt.

That’s funny Charlie, I was about to say I was waiting for the box to “animate”.

Very nice. I like how you attached the legs. Beautiful use of the woods.

-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso -- http://blanchardcreative.etsy.com -- http://snbcreative.wordpress.com/

Thank you, all for the kind comments. I love this place! It’s such an ego stroke!

Bwillie and Nicky, as with most projects I do, I did this one without a plan. Sometimes that works out for me, others – not so much. I usually have a sketch at least, but for this one I more or less “winged it.” I looked at others’ work on sites such as lumberjocks and drew upon design cues that I liked.

As far as elaborating on the construction, I’ll try. To tell the truth, I can’t remember exactly what my process was. This may be more detail than you wanted, but here goes:

I made the case sides of spalted maple. After rough milling the pieces, I saturated the punky parts of the wood in cyanoacrylate glue to stiffen it up. I cut the corner jointery on my tablesaw with a dado (1/2” fingers) and a simple box joint jig. I glued up these 4 pieces and foolishly took it to a cabinet shop to have the whole thing fed through their wide belt sander to get the top and bottom leveled and straight.

Here’s where the story gets good. It turns out that spalted maple doesn’t hold up so well to a wide belt sander when you stand it on end and feed it nearly perpendicular to the grain. Who knew, right?! I was not allowed to be in the shop, so I don’t know what happened, but I can only assume they weren’t as careful with my work as I would have been. Long story short (too late for that, I guess) they handed it back to me with a big chunk blown out of one side (as in half of that side) and told me “no charge.”

I managed to epoxy that piece back in when I got home and cooled off. If I point it out, it is still apparent, but nobody notices the repair otherwise. Here’s a pic of that side:

I’ll continue this later. Let me know if this is the kind of elaboration you were looking for, or if you just want something more simplified.

we LOVE elaborate!!!

and now your beautiful box has history to it already!! Gotta love that.

cyanoacrylate glue… ???

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

Thanks. Yep, good story’s of construction and muck ups remind us we all face the same tragedy at times.

Is this where the repair is?

-- ICN, Bill, (http://www.beavercreekfitness.com)

Bill – yep, that’s the most obvious part of the repair, where I had to mix sawdust in with the epoxy to try and color match. The glueline actually goes from front to rear. It starts in the middle of the top finger joint void (where you see the end grain of the front board) and goes down through the knot, then back up through the back side along the part that you noticed.

MsDebbieP – superglue and krazy glue are CA glues. I’m not sure if their formulas are different from one another or different from the stuff you can buy at woodcraft. I know at woodcraft, you can buy it in different viscosities, though. I use thin CA glue for stiffening up the more rotten sections of spalted wood. It saturates into the wood more readily than the thicker stuff will.

Beautiful Jewelry Box.

And the picture platform is not shabby either.

You probably need to show that as a project also.

-- What happens in the workshop stays in the workshop. No wait that doesn't sound right. Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com †

the glue sounds like something that would be helpful with my willow – there are spots that are pretty questionable.

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

Karson – that other project can be found here

Now, back to elaborating :)

I don’t know if I made the lid or the case first, but the dimensions (at least LxW) were dictated by the size of the veneered panels I had for the lid and bottom. They were actually panels I made when I was learning how to use my vacuum press. A gentleman some of you may know as “Joe Woodworker” showed me how to veneer in his basement a few years prior to this project, and I kept those panels around because I figured I would use them eventually. Sometimes pack rats actually DO get around to using the crap they stash away :) The top of the top panel has two bookmatched pieces of redwood burl on it, and the bottom of that panel is one sheet of karulien birch. If I recall correctly, we used 1/2” baltic birch ply as a substrate. The bottom panel is actually two veneered practice panels that I managed to bookmatch together and make the exposed surface (bottom outside) look passable. The inside would be covered with adhesive-backed felt, so I didn’t really care what it looked like. I biscuit jointed the plywood halves of the bottom panel together.

I framed the bottom panel with peruvian walnut and the top panel with black walnut crotch and a strip of birdseye maple to “set off” the walnut from the redwood burl and karulian birch. I used biscuits again to attach the frames to the veneered panels. I used them more for alignment than strength. I made the bottom panel flush with the frame on the inside of the box, so the “floor” would be flat. I centered the thickness of the top panel within the thickness of its frame. Prior to the glueups, I chamfered the inside edges of the frames where necessary to give the lid and bottom panel the appearance of true floating frame-and-panel construction. I guess I should note that the dimensions of the glued up lid and bottom panel were ever so slightly larger than the case sides (whether I made the case or lid/bottom panel first or after the fact… still don’t recall). This will make more sense later.

After the lid and bottom panels were glued up, I splined the corners with redwood splines.

That’s it for this installment (I feel like I’m blogging this after the fact or something). More to follow…

Muzhik, this is one of the nicest boxes posted on LJ”s. In case you weren’t aware, I just love small wooden boxes.

Your choice of wood for this project is 50% of the success of this box. The balance is your lovely design and flawless execution. It’s been three months since you last comment, but you still haven’t finished the story. I would like to learn more. I’m particularly interested in the crafting of the handle and legs, and the challenge involved in mounting the legs. Also I note there is a tray, yet the box is very shallow. How does the tray sit in the box? Is there any space between the bottom of the tray and the bottom of the box? Did you mention the spline material in the top and bottom frames? Finally what are the dimension of the box (minus the legs) and what is the finish?

Sorry, one more thing – the sideboard below the box look like something special as well – have you written about it?

-- CanuckDon "I just love small wooden boxes!" http://www.hilsbiblechurch.org/

Oops! In the words of the great Paul Harvey, ”...and now, the rest of the story.”

Don, the splines in the top and bottom frames are redwood. The table that the jewelry box is sitting on in the pictures is my coffee table. I’ve posted that project here along with the rest of my living room A/V furniture.

The tray is made of mahogany with tiny finger joints at the corners, dados where the dividers join the outer pieces, and half laps where the dividers intersect. I used 1/8” hardboard for the tray’s bottom panel, and it sits in grooves dado-ed into the outside strips. The botttom of the box and the bottom of the tray are lined with adhesive-backed velvet that I ordered from Rockler. I ordered the ring bar from them as well to match. The tray sits in a deep rabbet that I cut in the box sides after I assembled the main case. I accomplished this with a rabbeting router bit, followed by a laminate trimming flush bearing bit. I then squared up the corners with a chisel while being careful not to blow out the box joints. There is about an inch depth between the bottom of the tray and the bottom of the box.

For the handle, I sandwiched a strip of walunt between two strips of spalted maple and cut an angular shape that I thought would match the design. The feet are made from peruvian walnut. I roughed out their shapes on my tablesaw and mitersaw, then cut the tapers in the by hand with my block plane. The feet and handle are joined to the main cabinet and lid with brass rod. I drilled holes through the handle and legs at angles off perpendicular so that the exposed ends of the rods would be elliptical in shape. I more or less freehanded those holes, then used the handle as a jig to locate the holes on the lid. To get it to stand off, I drilled one hole, then the handle to the side to make the hole spacing on the lid wider than the hole spacing on the back of the handle.

As for the challenge of mounting the legs, I honestly don’t recall exactly how I solved that problem. I’m sorry to disappoint on this aspect. I do remember it being the biggest challenge. It seems like I toiled over how to make a jig to do it for a couple of days and finally wound up freehanding the holes for the legs as well, but drilling through the case first and using those holes as a guide to locate the holes in the feet.

I used 5-minute epoxy to glue the brass to wood. Once that set, I went to town with small files flushing the ends of the brass rod to the surfaces of the handle and legs and also fitting the other ends to the interior corners of the box.

The outside dimensions of the case are 11-1/2” x 17-1/2” x 3-3/4”. If I could do it again, I would probably make it a bit taller. My wife’s rings fit in the ring bar, but she can’t center them or they hit the lid. Instead, she must turn them sideways a bit so that the lid will close. Good thing I can’t afford to buy her any rings with BIG stones! :)

This is really a great work of art.Very nice wood selection and your design is wonderful.Spalted Maple is a difficult customer but so exotic.The patterns are so varied and resemble so many things.Nicely done!

-- " If I can make it,so can you" Andy in Oregon

WOW !!!

-- Odie, Confucius say, "He who laughs at one's self is BUTT of joke". http://woodstermangotwood.blogspot.com/ (my funny blog)

WOW from me too..

-- Wood and Glass they kick (well you know) Have a great day - Dug

great info and great looking projects

-- Ken, "Everyday above ground is a good day!"