It's extremely hot today and I'm someone who copes much better with 13° than 30°, so I've retreated indoors. Thankfully there's a spacious wooden-floored lounge area with a reasonable north-facing window, so I've still got somewhere I can work on the box without having to worry about getting plane shavings out of a carpet!
The first thing I did today was take the last slice of Sycamore (the other four slices were used on the drawer box I'm making) and plane it to an even thickness, which ended up being about 3 mm:
Here are all the bits for the box:
I've been pondering what to do with these walnut pieces over the last couple of days while we've been exploring the local area. In the end I decided to make a simple tray, with angled sides. A few months ago I did a few practice joints for a similar sort of tray. That one was going to be a bit smaller and with compound-angle dovetails (something I never quite got the hang of, although I've since bought
Mitch Peacock's Dovetail book, so perhaps that will help me be more successful).
In the meantime however, this one is going to be much simpler. I'm going to make it with splined mitred joints, but still with the 15° angle on each side. After having recently completed the
mini-moravian bench with its compound angles, I knew that I needed to be careful to make sure that the angles I was working with were correct. A quick CAD model confirmed my suspicions: for a 15° side splay, I needed a 46.92° mitre angle (rather than 45°) and a 104.51° end angle (rather than 105°). The latter is probably close enough not to matter, but that 2° error on the mitre angle is important.
I used a bit of simple trigonometry to mark up some reference lines on a scrap of plywood:
I'm under no illusion that I'll be cutting mitres at 46.92°, but hopefully they'll be closer to 47° than 45° and that'll be good enough.
After setting my sliding bevel to the reference angle, I spent some time tweaking the position of the top support piece on the shooting board until a mitre shot on the end of a bit of scrap matched the sliding bevel angle. The adjustability in the top support position wasn't enough to achieve the required angle, but it was close enough that I could deal with the rest by tweaking the angle of the blade in the
home-made block plane.
I also cut and planed another bit of the same off-cut to the 15°-ish angle required for the end angles and planed the mitre on the ends of that as well:
Shooting one of the ends of each piece was then quite straightforward (I didn't even bother to saw it roughly to shape, just attacked it with the block plane to take it all the way from square to mitred and angled):
The other one was a bit more fiddly as I needed an extra spacer between the angled piece and the fence and it was a bit awkward making sure they both stayed put. Nevertheless, it didn't take long:
All pieces with their ends shot:
I was really pleased that the first test assembly (with masking tape on the corners) looked really promising, with the mitres fitting snugly.
The next job was to sort out the top and bottom edges (which you might be able to see in the last photo were square to the sides rather than parallel with the top of the chest). To help with that, I dug out a bit of ash from the wood bag and planed it at 15°:
When I've travelled with my
toolchest in the past, I haven't brought screws with me as I generally don't use them for dovetailed boxes. However, this time, I'd brought some short stainless screws in case I decided to screw the drawer supports to the bench stretchers (which I did). Those screws came in handy today. I used one to fix the mitred test piece (trimmed smaller) to the ash block as a stop. I could then use the #4 on its side to plane the bottom edge of each piece:
Before doing the top edges, I screwed another couple of scraps onto the ash block:
Ploughing the groove for the tray's base took a bit of thought. The grooves needed to be parallel to the top and bottom rather than perpendicular to the inside faces. That ruled out using the depth stop on the little plough plane.
Instead, I flipped the vice over so that it could act as a stop and then set its height above the chest surface using my beloved
edge distance gauge thing:
The ash block is sandwiched between the raised vice face and a clamped bit of plywood and I could then plough down until the plane's fence hit the vice top, hence acting as a stop that could be adjusted by moving the vice face up and down as required:
The first groove ploughed:
The first one was a bit fiddly as I needed to use my right hand to apply downward pressure to the right-hand (top) side of the walnut piece (to stop it tilting down as a result of the ash piece being narrower than the walnut piece). That left only my left hand to control the plane. It worked, but it was awkward. For the other three, I asked Carolyn to press down on the walnut piece so I could have both hands on the plane and that was much quicker and easier.
With the grooves ploughed, I could do another trial fit with the (shot to size) base:
Then it was time for gluing:
It's now glued together with lots of masking tape holding it together:
Once the glue has had time to dry, I'll have a think about some splines to reinforce those mitre joints.
