I made these boxes for various carving tools early in my carving "career". Later on, I ended up making a wall-mount tool chest that held most of the tools, so the boxes now mostly help hold down a shelf.
The smallest box was a piece of an old bed frame that was up in the basement rafters when we moved into our current house. It has a Maple or Birchy look to it, but seems to be harder than both those woods, so I'm not really sure what it
is. This box was made by milling out the cavity using Dremel bits in a drill press equipped with a cross vise, forming a sort of poor-man's milling machine. One thing I learned from making this box was how easy it was to mess up hinge mounting - a few thousandths of an inch off, and the lid is noticeably misaligned.
The larger flat box was made from Maple. The faces were pinned and glued together. For hinges I used Japanese shoji screen hinges as an inspiration. The hinges are formed by winding a thick thread through a series of holes, providing a friction-free 180 degree hinge (with no stinkin' screws to be misaligned). As you might expect, these hinges have a bit of give to them, so I included alignment pins on the corner of the box to ensure the lid mated accurately with the body of the box.
The last box is a simple Baltic Birch plywood job. The only noteworthy feature are the box joints on the corner. They look interesting when they are rounded off, which reveals the contrasting wood plys.
| Material: | #1: Unknown (piece of bed frame) |
| #2: Maple |
| #3: Birch plywood |
| Finish: | #1: Some kinda varnish |
| #2: 3 coats Behr satin polyeurethane varnish |
| #3: S.K. varnish |
| Size: | #1: 6" w 2.5" d x 0.75" h |
| #2: 7.5" w 5.5" d x 1.0" h |
| #3: 12" w x 6.5" d x 1.4" h |
| Done: | #1: Circa 1996 |
| #2: December 14, 1996 |
| #3: Circa 1996 |
