Tea Bag Box - Part 2 Carcass Construction

 This box used extra wood I had laying around from prior projects.  For the cherry box, I spent a fair bit of time making sure everything was square and shot the ends.  I wanted to make the best half blind dovetails I could and my thinking is the more square everything is, the easier it will be.  Roughly, the box is 12" long by 4 inches high by six inches deep.  With 4 inch wide stock, I would normally make three dovetails.  However, since I was thawing through one of them to make the top, I thought it might be better to do with two wider dovetails.  What sealed it was that two dovetails resulted in dovetails that were roughly as wide as a tea bag.  I thought that little design element was a happy coincidence so two dovetails it would be.

To help transfer the tails onto the pins, or should I say, make it easier for me, I ran a 1/16" deep rebate on the sides that would house the pins.  After cutting out the dovetails, I carefully made sure everything was square.  Some minor paring was needed but all in all things were looking good.

I wanted to use half blind dovetails so that way when you looked at the box from the front it was just plain wood.  As you saw it from the side it was then you saw the dovetails.  I thought this would be a nice thing for this particular build.

Transferring the tails onto the pins went well.  Using the rebate really helps give a strong registration.  For cutting half blind dovetails, I don't cut right up to the line.  I leave quite a bit of waste and then chisel to the line as I remove the wasted.  I did each one all the way through before moving onto the next one so I could learn from each.  One of the challenges I have had in the past and still have now is that despite careful measuring and slow was remove (so I don't move the knife line), I still end up with a gap in the back of the dovetail where it meets at 90 degrees.  I used a mini engineering square to see if I couldn't find an obvious error but not really.  I'm still not sure why I get this gap.  It bothers me but I guess I just need to keep making more and I will eventually sort it out.  In 1Q22, I plan to spend at month or two just practicing dovetails.  I know historically, not all dovetails were gap free but I want mine to be so I will spend time to sort out what little things I need to do to make them better.  

Running the grooves was easily done with my small plough plane.  I have used it enough where I am fairly comfortable in how it performs.  Still need to be careful I don't angle the handle.  With those grooves done, it was time to get the maple divider wood prepared.

The rough saw scrap figured maple I had was 3/4" thick.  I wanted it to be 3/8" thick.  After establishing two reference faces, I marked it up for thickness and planed away.  I do look forward to the day when I own a bandsaw and can do it that way.  Till then, I just use the tools I have to get the job done.  I find it really helpful when thicknessing to on an angle on the side plane down to close to the line.  That way, when removing the middle waste, I can more easily see when I am close to proper thickness.  As with most of what I learned, this is something I picked up from Paul Sellers.

With the maple made with thickness, I cut it to length and width.  I am proud to say to say that by hand I can get the wood so that it feels all to be the same width and length when stacked up.  As best I can tell, this means there is less than a 64th in variation.  Not bad for hand tools.  Cutting the dados was straight forward and I got nice tight self supporting fits on 5 of the six housing dados.  The sixth wasn't self supporting in terms of snugness.  

I have a lot of 1/4" cherry faced plywood so I cut that to fit the top and bottom.  After doing a dry run, I did the full glue up.  There were two things I was a little concerned about:  getting the dividers flat to the bottom plywood and interior glue squeeze out.  Since I am sawing off the top, I can't see if there is an error.  The dry assembly was very helpful as it let me work through some assembly challenges  The glue up itself went well.  I used a lot of clamps to get everything snug.  In the next post, I will saw the box open and see if anything moved or not.