I had a little time on Sunday afternoon to work on a little project for my wife.  The project is a small wooden “box” that holds a couple of mason jars.  The mason jars hold pens and pencils.  So, think of it as a container for a container.

Rough Milling and Resawing

The project started out as some scrap walnut.  I had two large 6/4 10″X10″ pieces and some thinner stock to work with.  I started by flattening the two 6/4 pieces with my jack plane and then ran them through the planer.

After the planer, I cut the boards into 5″X10″ pieces.  Now I have four boards of 5X10.  I marked the center line (thickness) of each board and went to the band saw to resaw the boards into thinner stock.

After the resaw, I headed back to the planer to smooth the rough cut surface of all 8 boards.  After the planing I ended up around a little thicker than 3/8″

I totally forgot to plane the other boards with these 8 and had to plane them down afterwards.  So, not all the boards ended the same exact thickness, but really close.

I mentally laid out all the cuts with a tape measure and made sure I had enough wood.  I ended up having quite a bit more than needed, so  I decided to make three.

So lets cut some shhh…shtuff

Cutting

I cut all pieces to width first and then cut everything to length on the cross cut sled.  Yes I know its ridiculous that I have a T-Track in the sled and don’t use it.  I need to make something for small pieces.  I have a flip stop but it only works on larger stuff.

All p ieces are cut and ready for the joinery (jointery?)

There will be three identical pieces that make up the two sides and the middle divider.  They will look like a fat plus sign.  I set up the band saw with a stop block to cut the same depth on all 9 pieces (3 pcs per box) and set the fence to match the board thickness.

You can see the small notches made in the above picture.  Then I adjusted the fence to remove the waste material.  Voila, fat plus sign.

Jointery (or is it joinery?)

Now onto the base of the box.  For some reason, I wanted to rabbet and dado all the pieces into the base so it was time to set up the dado stack in the table saw.  I have found that nothing beats a pair of calipers when setting this up.  Usually I can get a real nice fit the first time, usually.

After some tweaking of the fence position, I made all the center dado cuts and then cut the rabbets.

One of the three ‘center’ pieces needed a quick shave with a block plane to get it to fit nicely.  The others were good.  Ready to try a dry fit of everythng together.

Nice try, but no.  The width of the “plus” sign was just a touch larger than the rabbeted base.  Out came the chisel to the rescue.  I did some quick paring and was ready to go.

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Clamping

Ready forsome glue and clamps! I thought to myself excitedly.  Little did I realize that this was going to frustrate me more than I anticipated.  I did a quick trial run and figured out that I was going to need a lot of clamps per box to get all the joints tight.  I should have thought of a differnet approach for clamping, but was excited and jumped in.   I clamped up two boxes and was left a little disappointed.  Here they are clamped up.

It became apparent that locations I needed to put clamps already had a clamp in the way.  Unfortunately these first two came out with gaps in a few of the joints.  My big mistake is that there are about 30 glue lines per box, bad design on my part.

Clamping (take 2)

I had a different strategy for the third box.  First, masking tape on the bottom to avoid the glue stains.  I only glued the center divider and the two lower “strips” in teh first glue up.

Still needed a bunch of clamps to get teh glue lines tight.  The following day I added the two sides and the top two strips.

Joint cleanup and sanding

After the glue dried I removed the masking tape and started to true up all the edges with a block plane. I like to clamp a small block to the rear side to avoid any major blowout while planing.

After all the edges and surfaces were trued up, I added a little chamfer and was ready for some light sanding.

Finishing

I love the simplicity of wipe on finish.  Danish oil never lets me down.  The color is medium walnut.

Finished Product Below

Below I placed some mason jars in there to give you an idea of what it would look like if we had any empty mason jars in the house.  Unfortunately we don’t, so use your imagination.  Instead of some type of tomato stuff, imagine pens and pencils sitting in the jars.

Here are some with actual writing utensils