Side table made with hand tools. No measurements used, all ratio and proportion based with hip height being the module. Curly maple drawer face from my yard in coastal Oregon. Lots of fun.

I was honored to be asked by a dear friend to make the urn when her husband recently lost the battle with cancer. He was a big supporter of my hand-tool interest and a bit of an ecologist, so she asked that I build it of local materials. This is from a maple tree in my yard, and the tray (intended to close off the bottom area as well as provide a place for photos, wedding rings, etc) is from Port Orford cedar which I did not mill myself but is local. I kept just a hint of live edge on the lid to keep the connection to natural source of the material. The bottom is a raised panel (“raised” downwards). I finished it (BLO/Varnish) inside and out, not something I normally do but I wanted the interior to also show the beautiful figure of the maple. This was done entirely with hand tools and was deeply rewarding work. I hope he likes it as much as I enjoyed building it.

I chronicle my hand-tool experiences at thejoinersapprentice.com

I’ve been working through the projects in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker”, and am making several of the schoolboxes (mentioned elswewhere as “the 1839 School Box”). I’m also working on a side project, but based on the school box design. It is smaller (about 9.5×11.5×10.5, but it was never measured while building). Unlike the school box, which has a bottom nailed on, in this case I put a groove along the bottom and put in a very crude raised panel of douglas fir. I also made the “partition” a full-size tray. I am not sure what I was thinking in boring the thumb holes on the front and back of the tray instead of the sides. Perhaps I will add more holes, but this really was a practice piece to work out the problems of the grooved bottom and recessing the lip for the tray to rest on. I also used some cheap hardware store hinges instead of wrought-iron strap hinges in the name of frugality. Instead of moulding, I just used an oversize slab of maple with a live edge. The body of the board is alder and the top is curly maple. The tray is made of incense cedar. I ripped the boards to make the tray by hand with a tenon saw… that was not fun even for a soft wood only about an inch thick! It is nice to know it is possible, though, and not that hard. Just very painstaking and tedious.

The last image shows the other school box, which is made entirely of alder except the bottom and partition which are douglas fir.

These boxes were both made 100% with hand tools after the initial milling on a portable bandsaw mill. It is nice knowing that most of these trees came from my yard (the maple) and the home across the street (the alder and fir).

I blog about my experiences with learning traditional hand tool use at: thejoinersapprentice.com

I’ve been working through the book The Joiner and Cabinet Maker, and this is the 2nd project. I have already made 3 of the “packing boxes” and will make a few more of these school boxes before doing the chest of drawers. My goal is to test the claim that co-author Chris Schwarz made in stating that working through this book would result in skills required to move onward as a “journeyman” in the traditional hand-tool sense. I have been woodoworking on a casual level for decades, but I have only taken hand-tool approaches seriously with this project, and am loving every moment of it.

If you have not read this book, the box here is meant for a wealthy young school boy to take his books, snacks, and toys with him on a carriage ride and then house his possessions during the school day. It has dovetailed corners, an inset lock and hinges, and was done from rough lumber entirely with hand tools. In the book, “deal” or soft pine was used, but I cannot find that locally so this is alder from a tree on my road, milled with a portable gas-powered mill and then dimensioned entirely with hand planes.

Its been a lot of fun and a real education in traditional woodworking!