When I took the box out of the clamps, I was happy. While still one whole piece, I used my freshly sharpened No. 3 hand plane (my favorite size for smoothing work) to flush up the dovetails and get the top and bottom flushed and flat. My bench is a good flat reference for this so I mostly just kept planeing and checking to see if there was any rock. When the rock was gone, I stopped. I tried my winding sticks as well but couldn't see any wind and the simple rocking check seemed to work.
Now came time to cut the box open. I triple checked which side was the top vs. the bottom. Nothing would be worse cutting open the box on the wrong side and cutting into the maple housing dividers I had put inside. I used my mortise gauge to provide two lines 1/8th" apart. As long as I stayed between those lines, clean up should be easy. I slowly cut the box open with my fine joinery saw and stayed between the two lines. Success! Then just cleaned it up with my No 3 hand plane and made sure the two new surfaces were rocking free on the bench.
Before the finishing was applied (don't have proper photo so showing photo after I applied finish), I mortised out the hinge locations in box and lid. For the hinges, I used Horton Brasses 90 degree stopped hinges. I have to give a shout out to Fine Woodworking's Shop Talk Live. I enjoy this biweekly podcast. These stopped hinges were mentioned there rather recently. I didn't know such things existed so I ordered them. By using these, I didn't need to use a stop chain. For this particular project I didn't want to use a chain so this was a perfect solution.
Now it was time to move onto the finishing. Prior to assembly, I had finished the inside with blond shellac. For the outside I used 1-1/2 pound cut of garnet shellac. After 4 coats I denibbed and then put another three or so coats. Then, I let it set up for a few days. I find that shellac tends to harden up a bit as that final ethanol evaporates. Then used some 0000 steel wool and wax on the outside. I used some Minwax cherry colored "crayons" to fill the gaps. It just makes them a bit less visible.
With this nearly complete, it was time to drill holes and install the hardware. Given I had an oops happen, let me detail how I drill the holes for my hardware. I use my digital calipers to measure the inside the threads distance of the stem of the screw and use the appropriate bit. I have one of those drill it sets that go up by 64ths so I can usually find the proper side. For the feet, I am using some Brusso brass feet to raise the bottom of the box up by like an eighth or sixteenth of an inch. Brusso included a steel screw with the brass screws. The error I made was that I measured the diameter of the steel screw, which I had planned to use to pre thread the holes and NOT the brass screws. I had ASSUMED they would be the same. It turns out that the diameter of the steel screw was larger than or just equal to the diameter of the threads on the brass screws. As such, when I put the brass screws into the pre-drilled holes, there was no thread bite at all. I was rather upset by this. Shame on me for not checking the brass screws directly and shame on Brusso for having this mismatch. My lesson learned was I will now always check the diameters of the intended screws and then check if a steel driver screws. After I took a break to calm down, I grabbed some bamboo skewers from the kitchen, whittled them down and glued them in place.
The next day, I drilled the proper size screws for the brass feet. Then moved onto hinges and then onto the knob. Finished! It took a total of 41 hours to make this. I am fairly happy with it. It's not perfect but it is as good as I can make things right now and that is fine. Each project feels like I get a bit more skilled and that is all I can ask for.
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