Stretching My Skills Part 2 - Making the Paul Seller's Keepsake Box

 With the pins and tails cut, it was time to run the grooves to house the top and bottom.  As I mentioned in the first post, the rebates on the tails allows through grooves to be used which is really handy for me as I use my plough plane.  The only challenge was making sure that I didn't dip the plough plan at the beginning or end of the cuts (I did a big sigh) as the would leave very slight gaps.  The Spanish cedar was certainly to make grooves in.

With the grooves done, it was time to put the curves on the side.  I had made a mistake.  I misread the wood thickness.  Fortunately, my wood was thicker at the apex of the curved sides.  That just meant I'd have more wood to remove with my hand planes.  Given the Spanish cedar was easy to work with, I wasn't too worried.  The radius for the curve was on the order of 10 or 11" so I set up a quick jig to strike the arcs.  Then, it was just a matter of hand plane and fine chisel work.  Later I went back with a block plane to remove any facets on the curve.  In the last post I had mentioned if you undercut your dovetails they will show as gaps.  Guess what?  I had some gaps.  Sloppy sloppy sloppy.  I will be much more careful on the next one on my dovetail bases.  Normally it doesn't matter if you undercut as it can't be seen but in this case it does matter.  Mostly I got nailed because I had become complacent in not practicing making the baseline a perfect 90 degrees.  I have seen over and over where we do things a certain way so that we help practice proper technique BUT also to build in a safeguard on one of the times where doing it "sloppy" and think it won't show and it does like happened in this case.  Not the end of the world but something for me to keep in mind as I move forward.  I think all of these little things add up on the overall impression of the final piece.  Nuff said.

Time to make the top and bottom.  It was reasonably straight forward.  I wish I would have had wide enough stock so that I didn't need to glue two pieces together.  However at this point, it was clear this was a practice piece so I wasn't going to go search out wider stock.  I kind of like it, in some situations where I can have the glue line off center as I think this helps to hide it a bit.  There are times where symmetry in the glue up is good but for this, I was happy to purposefully be off center.  Plough plane to cut a groove then handsaw to cut down one side that remains so it will fit in the sides.  The only thing that I was a bit anxious about was using the plough plane on end grain.  Not sure if I had ever done it before.  Given how uneventful that was I was happy.  I spent extra time trying to make sure my fit for the top and bottom was a bit on the loose side.  The walls of the sides get a bit thin on the top and bottom are I wanted to minimize any resistance during assembly.

After doing a dry practice run for glue up with the planned cauls, it was time to glue it up.  It felt a bit fiddly during glue up.  Despite being careful, I head a loud crack during glue up.  Between thinness, my level of skill, and soft/brittle Spanish cedar I had a major break.  It sounded horrible and I waited till the next day to take it apart and it looked horrible.  

There was a strong urge to burn the box.  Again, at this point it had become a practice piece so I realized there was little I could do to make it worse.  I decided to take it all the way through to see what other lucky surprises might be in store.  Also, it would give me a good chance to practice trying to recover from a major issue.  This blog is getting long so I will save that for the next post but in essence, glue and clamp the breaks and then use inlay.  The inlay was Ralph's clever idea from The Accidental Woodworker blogpost.  Above I've got the final product shown.