Another box WIP

[Dr.Al]

I've brought my Travel Tool Chest & Workbench and Mini Moravian Bench to France for a couple of weeks. The first full day I was thoroughly knackered after 12 hours (including stops) of driving from St Malo down to Monein near Pau. It was also 32°C. With the temperature and the general feeling of exhaustion I didn't fancy doing very much at all. The second day was cooler but we had a bit of an explore of the local area and I never quite got as far as getting going. Today is day three and the bench & chest finally got set up:

Before coming away, I'd had a little session with the bandsaw chopping some bits of wood up. I didn't particularly have a plan for what I was going to make; I just resawed some wood to be about 10 mm thick and some other wood to be about 15 mm or so thick and figured I'd think about it when I got here.

I'm here now, so I guess I need to think about it!

I've started with an off-cut of sycamore, left over from making the bench and which I'd sliced into five pieces, four of them about 10 mm thick and one (not pictured) a lot thinner.

The first job was to sort out the rough-sawn faces, for which I used the bevel-up smoothing plane with a 40° bevel blade (giving a 52° cutting angle):

Another view:

That carrier bag on the right is there so I can chuck (most of) the plane shavings in while I go rather than having to sweep up too much at the end of each day.

With the slices all planed, I laid them out on the chest top and played around with different arrangements until I'd decided what would be the top, bottom and sides:

There was then a bit of cross-cutting...

... and a bit of ripping...

With them all roughly the right size, I could shoot the ends square...

... and I also shot the sides square as it seemed quicker and easier than mounting them upright and planing the edges that way.

That has left me four planks ready to be made into the frame of a box:

The three on the top row will be the top and sides, the one underneath will be the bottom. The box is going to be something along the lines of the drawer box I made when I was away in Brittany last year. The details of the construction are still to be decided though!

I've already made quite a pile of shavings:

 

[Malc2098]

Don't yer just love the look of fleckled Sycamore.

 

[Woodbloke]

Nice job, Dr. Al but if I even so much as suggested that sort of malarky on a foreign trip, you'd have to ship me (probably in bits) home in a box - Rob

 

[AndyP]

Couldn’t you have positioned the bench to get a better view?

 

[AndyT]

I do rather approve of the way you've managed to spend holiday time doing what you really enjoy, not just doing other stuff that happens to be available.

And that's very pretty grain you've chosen.

 

[Steve Maskery]

I'm beginning to see why you undertook such a daft project with the bench!
Fantastic job.

S

 

[Dr.Al]

Don't yer just love the look of fleckled Sycamore.

I certainly do

Nice job, Dr. Al but if I even so much as suggested that sort of malarky on a foreign trip, you'd have to ship me (probably in bits) home in a box - Rob

Carolyn's quite content sketching / doing other projects so she's quite happy with us both pottering away.

 

[Dr.Al]

Couldn’t you have positioned the bench to get a better view?

The view's not bad from the bench all things considered...

 

[Dr.Al]

Looking even better as the sky starts to clear and the sun goes down...

 

[duke]

The travelling wood shop, very well done Dr.Al and great views.

 

[Mike G]

Great fun, Al. The imperative for finishing the bench is now clear. It's a pain having to clamp pieces to the box top, though, just to saw them. Haven't you got bench hooks, or some sort of stop arrangement which would be a little less clunky?

 

[Dr.Al]

Great fun, Al. The imperative for finishing the bench is now clear. It's a pain having to clamp pieces to the box top, though, just to saw them. Haven't you got bench hooks, or some sort of stop arrangement which would be a little less clunky?

I do have an option for a sort of bench hook: just clamping something in the vice like this:



(remember that I'm using Japanese pull saws, so the stop has to be on my side rather than the far side).

However I've never really had a problem with using a couple of clamps. It only takes a 20 seconds to clamp the wood down and I can then use both hands for sawing at the start (which I find more accurate) and can catch the off-cut with my free hand at the end.

I'm not in a rush at all, so taking a bit longer through not having a bench hook or whatever doesn't really bother me. This is very much leisurely pace woodworking, so the polar opposite to what you impress us all by doing!

 

[JamesHow]

I certainly do

Carolyn's quite content sketching / doing other projects so she's quite happy with us both pottering away.

Has she a sister lol!

 

[Dr.Al]

A good chunk of today was spent exploring the Pyrenean foothills (the cloud cover was too low to be worth going up higher), but I did manage a little bit of work on the box before and after.

I decided to use mitred dovetails. There are two reasons for that: partly that I think they look better, but mostly that it makes it much easier to cut the groove for the piece that will form the back of the box as it can be ploughed through. I don't have a 45° reference to help with chiselling the mitres, so I started off by making one from the thickest off-cut I could find that was still thin enough to tuck under the mitre support on the chest's shooting board:

It's only a shallow little mitre guide, but hopefully it'll do the job:

Next up, I marked the ends of the tail boards for some evenly spaced pin sockets:

You may notice that there's only one mark for each pin socket rather than my usual two. That's because I've decided to have a go at some very narrow pins, something I've never tried before. For the ones that go onto the bottom piece, I sawed either side of the marked line:

I then used a 3 mm chisel, which was just narrow enough to clean out the waste.

Without the pins cut yet, it's too early to say whether that's worked okay, but buoyed by the seeming success of that exercise, I decided to go even narrower for the joints with the top piece. Rather than sawing each side of the line, I sawed the first side of the pin on the line and then sawed the second side starting in the kerf of the first saw cut:

For these sockets I had to use a 2 mm chisel to clean out the waste (which was a lot more fiddly as the waste didn't really want to come out!):

To transfer the locations across, I marked the end of the pin board with masking tape and used my usual trick with a 1 mm thick steel rule and a couple of spring clamps to help line the shoulder up...

... then plonked it on top to knife the lines into the masking tape:

That was very straightforward on the bottom board but a lot more challenging on the top board. The reason for the difficulty is that the blade on my little folding marking knife (one of these) is thicker than the kerf on my Dozuki and hence I couldn't get it to the whole length of the tail edge. Instead, I marked as much as I could and then used the long sharp edge of the knife to make a straight line all the way across once the tail board had been removed.

I then started sawing the waste and proceeded to make a mistake design change on the very first cut: by sawing straight down on one of the edges that should have been cut at 45° for part of the mitre:

This is what I should have done:

Never mind: I'll just have mitred corners at the back (where the groove will be ploughed) and square corners at the front.

The bulk of the waste got chopped out with the fretsaw...

... and the edge pieces at the front and the mitres at the back got sawn off roughly with the Dozuki:

This photo shows those narrow pins (pre-sawing) on one of the ends of the top board:

Finally for this post, I got on with chopping the shoulder lines, initially with a 12 mm Ashley Iles chisel but later swapping to an 8 mm Narex one:

I've done most of the chopping but it didn't seem worth a photo until I'd sorted out the mitres, so you'll have to wait for the next post to see more.

 

[Mike G]

Excellent Al. I think those 1-kerf dovetails are known as "London pattern", but I could well be wrong. I don't do them often because of the lack of fine enough chisels for cleaning up. I've never even heard of a 2mm chisel!

 

[Dr.Al]

Excellent Al. I think those 1-kerf dovetails are known as "London pattern", but I could well be wrong. I don't do them often because of the lack of fine enough chisels for cleaning up. I've never even heard of a 2mm chisel!

Mine is one of these: https://amzn.to/4meqmLT - I can't remember where I bought it from but I'm sure it was cheaper than amazon are offering! It would benefit with a little bit of shaping (like the Ashley Iles ones) near the tip; I might have a go at grinding that in at some point.

 

[Raymedullary]

Straightforward enough to make a very narrow chisel.... I have an old Stanley 1/8" that I ground the sides down to about 2mm. Another way to make very small chisels is by grinding jigsaw blades so either very thin or very narrow "chisels" can be made.

 

[Woodbloke]

I've never even heard of a 2mm chisel!

I saw them some years ago (Ashley Isles) on the Workshop Heaven site but haven't seen them since. I should've bought one at the time but as the old saying goes, I snoozed and lost - Rob

 

[Dr.Al]

Over the last couple of days we've been out and about in the Pyrenees. The scenery round here is beautiful and we even got to see a golden eagle up extremely close when it flew across in front of us. With all that, I didn't do any more on the box until this morning.

Before doing anything on the box itself, I decided to fix the drawer supports in place permanently:

I really like having the three most useful drawers lying on the bench stretchers so I'm happy to commit to the screw holes now (the supports were originally just held in place with double-sided tape).

Returning to the box, the first thing I did today was chisel the mitred corners using the mitre guide I prepared in the last instalment:

I then relieved all the inside corners of the tails in order to help the joints go together easily:

For the back of the chest, I didn't have any Sycamore that was big enough, so I pulled out a bit of 6 mm ish rough sawn Sweet Chestnut:

After cutting it in half, I planed that on both sides, resulting in a piece about 5 mm thick:

I could then plough some matching grooves and it was nice to be able to use the little plough plane that I found a spot for in one of the drawers. It took a while to get everything set-up: various stops clamped to the bench and the assembly of the plough plane itself, which is packed in pieces in the tool chest. However, once everything was set up, ploughing the four grooves was completed very quickly:

The four side pieces with their grooves:

I'm planning to make this into a box with two drawers. I've brought a piece of 16 mm-ish thick American Black Walnut with me to act as the drawer fronts. Unlike the previous drawer box (which had the dividing "shelf" hidden behind a lip on the lower drawer), I've decided to make the "shelf" visible but to try to grain match it to the drawer fronts. To that end, I marked up a thin-ish strip in the middle of the plank:

After cross-cutting to length, I reinforced the pencil marks...

... and (after taking a deep breath as I was a bit nervous about sawing skew-whiff), I ripped the board into three pieces with the Dozuki:

I was rather pleased with how that went:

The other half of the Sweet Chestnut plank will be used for most of the shelf, but the thinner bit of Walnut will act as a trim to (hopefully) make it look better. Without bothering to try to plane the face sides down at all, I just planed the joining edge straight and square on the two pieces:

Glue was applied...

... and then I got a bit carried away with masking tape:

Once the glue has dried, I'll plane the faces and then trim it to the final size. I'm not going to cut the housing in the case sides until I've planed the shelf to thickness; that way I can be more confident of getting a snug housing joint.

At this point, I realised that I won't be able to finish this drawer box while I'm in France. I hadn't planned what I was going to make very carefully for this trip, just chucking a load of wood in a bag and assuming I'd figure it out when I got here. I did, however, put a load of thin off-cuts of Sycamore in, thinking they would be good for drawer sides. They will be good for drawer sides, but I've made this box quite big as I wanted relatively deep drawers and as such the Sycamore pieces are too narrow to be used for the sides of the two drawers:

I could make the top drawer narrower than the bottom one and continue to make the top drawer with that Sycamore (and sort out the bottom drawer when I get back home) or I could make them both equal and sort both drawers out when I get home. Either way, the box won't be finished while I'm here, but that doesn't really matter - it's still nice to have some woodworking tasks to get on with. I'll have a rummage through the rest of the wood that I brought with me and I may be able to use that Sycamore for something else instead, or alternatively just make (or start making) a completely different box altogether. This is the downside of not planning the boxes I'm going to make in advance!

 

[Mike G]

Lovely stuff, Al. Not many of us have the luxury of woodworking whilst away on holiday. Your ingenious set-up makes it possible....along with the approval of your wife, of course.

 

[Dr.Al]

After the glue had been left for a couple of hours, I got impatient and decided that it would probably be okay to take the tape off and start planing it. Firstly, I planed the two faces, producing some lovely stripy plane shavings:

I then sawed the piece to about the right size and then shot the edges square. To my surprise, this also produced some two-tone plane shavings, showing how effective the glue joint is:

One of the next things I need to do is cut the housing for the shelf to sit in. As I said in the last post, I have a choice between making the drawers the same size (this was the original plan) or shrinking the top one to a shade under 50 mm to match the drawer-side-stock I have available.

I'm struggling to decide so I thought I'd knock up a quick CAD model to get an idea of how the two look (with some arbitrary drawer pull shapes modelled in to help get a feel for it). I've left the shelf a generic blue colour to make it more obvious versus the walnut-coloured drawers but in the real thing it'd all be the same colour.

This is what it looks like with equal sized drawers:

This is what it looks like with the top drawer reduced in height:

Opinions welcome...

 

[Mike G]

What are your bounding dimensions for the drawers, Al? And what is their purpose (what's going in them)? I ask because the 2 equal drawers look right, and I think that if you are to have un-equal drawers then the difference would benefit from being larger. That is, a smaller small drawer, and a larger big drawer. If that doesn't work for the contents, though, it's a non-starter.

 

[Dr.Al]

What are your bounding dimensions for the drawers, Al? And what is their purpose (what's going in them)? I ask because the 2 equal drawers look right, and I think that if you are to have un-equal drawers then the difference would benefit from being larger. That is, a smaller small drawer, and a larger big drawer. If that doesn't work for the contents, though, it's a non-starter.

That's a very good question (or set of questions)!

I'll start with "what is their purpose?". Honestly: I've no idea. There are very few boxes I've made with any particular purpose in mind (the main exceptions being the tea caddies and the peg loom peg boxes). Generally I just make boxes because I quite like making boxes. Sometimes I figure out a use for them afterwards, sometimes I give them away as gifts and let the recipient figure out the use, sometimes they stay empty!

As for bounding dimensions, the height of the cavity (as defined by the shoulder lines of the side pieces) is 130 mm. The height of the dividing shelf is 5 mm. The quarter-sawn Sycamore I have here that could be used for drawer sides is about 50 mm wide (call it 48 mm to allow for planing). In theory, I could therefore make the top drawer any size up to 48 mm with the stock I've got or any size up to 62.5 mm if I wait until I get home.

However, it's just occurred to me to check the size of the black walnut piece that will become the bottom drawer front. That's 70 mm wide (with one edge planed). That means that the bottom drawer can be a maximum of 70 mm deep and hence the minimum top drawer size is 55 mm.

I think that means it needs to be the equal sized drawer option.

Edit: the piece allocated as the top drawer front (purely on the basis of which side of the shelf looks a bit better - I figured that should be the top side) is a bit bigger at 80 mm deep, so I could do an 78-ish mm bottom drawer and a 47-ish mm top drawer. With that arrangement the unequal model I showed would be possible, but only just. I wouldn't be able to make a smaller top drawer.

 

[AndyP]

Does the thirds rule work for double drawer boxes? 1/3rd, 2/3rd in this case?

 

[Dr.Al]

Does the thirds rule work for double drawer boxes? 1/3rd, 2/3rd in this case?

If it did, it'd work out as 42 ish & 83 ish millimetre drawers. That would, unfortunately, mean starting again with the drawer fronts & divider due to where I put the saw cuts.

I think I'm leaning towards keeping it simple & going 50/50.

Maybe one day I'll plan a box before starting to make it!

 

[Dr.Al]

A decision has been made: they're going to be equal size and I'll make the drawers when I get back home.

With that decided, I marked up the position of the central housing:

I flipped the vice over so it could act as a stop (when pulling the router plane towards the vice) and taped the two side pieces down. The tape was mostly there to protect the surface of the wood from any bits that might get caught under the router plane base (or any cast iron dust coming from the router plane), but I figured it wouldn't hurt to extend the tape a bit further and help stop the pieces sliding around.

I started each pocket at the front end with some chisels to give the router plane easier access:

Then started taking cuts with a 4 mm cutter (in the 5 mm slot) in the router plane:

It didn't take long to get down to the bottom. Once there, I cleaned up the front end (for which I'd left a little bit of wood for final clean up, just in case) with a 3 mm chisel.

With the housings done, I could plonk the shelf in the pocket and mark the finished depth, ready for trimming:

With that, it felt like everything was probably ready to be assembled, so I gave the inner surfaces a final light pass with a smoothing plane...

... assembled everything for gluing...

... and then squeezed it all together:

It was a bit tight (this is the first time I've ever glued a dovetail together without a full trial fit first), but went together with some persuasion. Hopefully that won't mean that the wood cracks later, but I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it! We'll be off out exploring tomorrow so I probably won't get to do any more on the box until Monday, but the next thing will be to plane the outer faces and see what it looks like. If all is well, it'll then get stored somewhere to wait for drawers to be made when I'm back in Blighty.

 

[Cabinetman]

Too late for my preference (uneven).
I’ve always cut stopped housings by marking with a knife then digging a hole at the far end and after making a knife wall- I think that’s what it’s called nowadays, cutting down with a tenon/dovetail saw and either use a router or chisel to remove the waste. Never crossed my mind to do it without cutting down first but it obviously works.

 

[Dr.Al]

Too late for my preference (uneven).
I’ve always cut stopped housings by marking with a knife then digging a hole at the far end and after making a knife wall- I think that’s what it’s called nowadays, cutting down with a tenon/dovetail saw and either use a router or chisel to remove the waste. Never crossed my mind to do it without cutting down first but it obviously works.

I did run a knife along the edge after every couple of passes with the router plane; that helps get the waste out easily but isn't essential.

I did these housings as what you might call doubly-stopped: i.e they're closed at both ends. That would have made sawing quite awkward (especially without a very short saw). Of course I could have cut straight through the back side, but I thought it would look better at the back if I didn't.

 

[Cabinetman]

Ah, yes I hadn’t spotted that. I’ve done a few double stopped housings with just a chisel in the past too.

 

[Dr.Al]

Ah, yes I hadn’t spotted that. I’ve done a few double stopped housings with just a chisel in the past too.

I did some stopped (and also open) grooves with a 3 mm chisel once (as part of the daft minimal tool challenge I did), but that wasn't something I'd recommend to anyone

 

[AndyT]

I've never even heard of a 2mm chisel!

Here's my thinnest one. I have used it, but admittedly not often.







I expect Al will find one in a vide-grenier now!

 

[Dr.Al]

Here's my thinnest one. I have used it, but admittedly not often.

View attachment 35760

View attachment 35761

View attachment 35762

I expect Al will find one in a vide-grenier now!

I've got another small one I picked up in a junk shop a while ago. I can't remember how thick it is (I haven't used it yet) but I'll try to remember to measure it when I get back home. I doubt it's as small as yours though!

We've resisted the temptations of Brocantes (junk shops) so far on this holiday, but that might yet change!

 

[Dr.Al]

This morning I clamped the box to the side of the chest and cleaned up all the joints with the little home-made block plane:

The result:

Close-up of one of the corners:

There isn't much more I can do on this box now until I get home. I guess I could get the drawer fronts sized to fit the gaps, but it seems a little pointless given that's all I'll be able to do.

I'll have a ponder (and a scan through the wood pile) to see what other project I can get on with. It probably won't be a drawer box (I doubt I'll have time to do another one from start to finish while we're here) but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

For now, I'll finish with a photo of a local escape-artist inspecting the bench:

 

[AJB Temple]

My wife would take a very dim view of me doing woodwork on holiday. We would be discussing decree's. Withdrawal of all marital privileges, and other draconian measures. Holidays require full attention to Mrs AJBT and plentiful outings. You clearly have a very tolerant wife Dr. Al

 

[Dr.Al]

My wife would take a very dim view of me doing woodwork on holiday. We would be discussing decree's. Withdrawal of all marital privileges, and other draconian measures. Holidays require full attention to Mrs AJBT and plentiful outings. You clearly have a very tolerant wife Dr. Al

I get a lot of comments along those lines. Partly, it makes me think that lots of people must have seriously intolerant wives , but in all honesty, it's just a sign that everyone lives a different life and has different trials they need to overcome.

We used to spend our holidays hill-walking (often in the Lake District) almost every day, with "rest days" spent exploring local towns. However, life-changing illnesses are, well, somewhat life-changing and Carolyn getting M.E. had an enormous impact on how we spend our time. She can't do the hill walks any more and needs rest even after a relatively gentle day of wandering around; often needing a full day of doing nothing after a relatively intense day. She also needs a lot more sleep (whereas my 7am work starts have pulled me kicking and screaming into being a bit of an early riser) so even if we were doing stuff every day I'd still have some time in the morning to potter.

Having said all that, even back in the days we were hill-walking almost every day, it wasn't uncommon that we'd get back to the accommodation by about 5 or 6pm and then have an hour or two relaxing before thinking about dinner (it is supposed to be a holiday after all!). Even back then I'm sure Carolyn would have been happy for me to spend that hour or two woodworking on the patio next to her rather than, say, reading a book.

 

[AndyP]

Thursday would be a good day not to travel too far Al.

 

[AJB Temple]

Great response Al. I had forgotten about the ME. Makes a great deal of sense.

 

[Woodbloke]

My wife would take a very dim view of me doing woodwork on holiday. We would be discussing decree's. Withdrawal of all marital privileges, and other draconian measures. Holidays require full attention to Mrs AJBT and plentiful outings. You clearly have a very tolerant wife Dr. Al

Thee and me - Rob

 

[NickM]

This morning I clamped the box to the side of the chest and cleaned up all the joints with the little home-made block plane:

The result:

Close-up of one of the corners:

There isn't much more I can do on this box now until I get home. I guess I could get the drawer fronts sized to fit the gaps, but it seems a little pointless given that's all I'll be able to do.

I'll have a ponder (and a scan through the wood pile) to see what other project I can get on with. It probably won't be a drawer box (I doubt I'll have time to do another one from start to finish while we're here) but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

For now, I'll finish with a photo of a local escape-artist inspecting the bench:

The bench looks amazing in the chicken photo!

In the close up photo, is the mitred corner on the left? If so, do you need to take a bit more off the top face (or maybe just the corner?) so the mitre joins at a point? It might just be the photo, but it looks as though the joint isn't quite even.

The sycamore is lovely and the dovetails look perfect.

 

[Dr.Al]

The bench looks amazing in the chicken photo!

In the close up photo, is the mitred corner on the left? If so, do you need to take a bit more off the top face (or maybe just the corner?) so the mitre joins at a point? It might just be the photo, but it looks as though the joint isn't quite even.

The sycamore is lovely and the dovetails look perfect.

Thanks Nick. I don't think any of the mitres are that good to be honest. I'll try to fettle them a bit when I get home, but they're definitely not my best effort.