My First Box

I’ve had 4 pieces of 5/4 black walnut (about 6-8” long) sitting around in the garage for months. I got them for $1 at Woodcraft in their cutoff bin. I’ve been trying to think of what to use them for and decided to make my wife a box. I just got Taunton’s Basic Box Making last week and really wanted to try out those mitered keys.

It involved resawing the black walnut and a QS white oak board I have laying around, and that was a first for me too. Since I don’t have a bandsaw (I guess that’s the best way to resaw?), I used the table saw. Kind of scary when doing it the first time…

It only took a few cuts on the table saw after the resawing, but I still managed to screw it up a little. I wanted to speed up mitering the edges of the smaller end pieces. So I stacked them and then ran them over the blade. Well, that meant that the blade went into the top piece at a different depth than the bottom piece. At least it didn’t go all the way through!

I fixed the sawing mistake by inlaying the groove with a sliver of lace wood.

The bottom of the box is 1/4” plywood from a previous project.

Now that I think of it, this whole project consisted of wood that I had laying around as scraps. Even though I bought the QS white oak and black walnut from the Woodcraft cutoff bins, I had only meant to use it as practice wood anyway.

I used 2 coats of Minwax’s Pecan oil finish and 2 rounds of sanding at 400 grit.

-- Splintered Board Podcast - Woodworker Un-extraordinaire