Woodworking

I no longer have the same hands that I did 25 years ago, but I do still have the same wood-carving gouge.

Some time in 2000, I decided to make a box for Madison Cook-Hines to use for keeping small treasures in. I think every kid should have a special box of that kind. I made it from a nice mahogany board that I bought at Arroyo Hardwoods in Pasadena. The top and the floor of the box are each of a single piece of wood, but the sides are glued together from a fairly large number of pieces, in order that the grain could run top to bottom. Click on each thumbnail to see a half-size version of the picture; to see a full-size version, click on the Delta (Δ). In any case, get back to this page by hitting the “Back” button of your browser.

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Before the bottom was oiled. You can clearly see the grain of the sides and the floor.	All oiled, a view from the front with the top not in place.	Left-side view.	Right-side view.	View from the back. I used tung oil: clear, hard, and fast-drying.

Around 2000 and 2001, the girls went to a play-space that had a special toy: a little cart that one girl could climb into, if she was small enough, and another could push her about in. When the girls stopped going to that play-space, they missed the cart, and I offered to make one for their use at home. I found a nice piece of maple at Arroyo Hardwoods, slightly curly and birdseyed, and improved the original design by making the rear a little higher than the front, and by canting the rear wall of the box, to make it more comfortable to sit in.

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Sanding the glued-up box. You can see that the back is higher.	Setting the wooden bearings for the wooden wheels.	The push-handle being glued.	Chamfering the edges.	Oiled with linseed oil, accents in purpleheart.

For the twins, Devlin and Harris, I would need to present two boxes simultaneously, or at most ten minutes apart, at any rate. But not two identical boxes! The first of the two, I decided, should be a miniature chest, but with false fronts and false drawers. There is a rear side, completely blank, and three “front” sides: left, fore, and right. The two genuine drawers are on the fore side and the right side, while the left side has only the two dummy drawers.

The most time-consuming task was to construct the two drawers. The front and back of the drawers are of cherry, but the sides are of maple, because these are the part that slides on the internal guides. Once the drawers were out of the way, the rest, as complicated as it was, seemed to go very rapidly. The carcase is all of cherry, joined with simple finger joints—I'm not skilled enough to do real dovetailing. I didn’t want to have any end-grain on the top, so I glued it together from four triangles, and the effect is very pleasing.

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Gluing up a drawer. The strap clamp is ideal for holding together a hollow rectangle.	The carcase is ready to be glued. It’s been pulled apart a little so that you can see the finger joints.	The guides for the drawers are in place, but the front-plates need to be glued on to the drawers.	Using a carving gouge to give the drawer-edge a rounded chamfer.	One of the drawers has been oiled in tung-oil, as has the top. Note how the oil brings out the grain.

The chest was finished in Spring 2003, and I think it’s the most successful of my projects. If you have broad-band service instead of dial-up, you may click in the picture to open another window with a stop-frame “movie” that shows the box rather well.

In early ’07, I finally finished the third box, in the shape of a ladybeetle, work described on a separate page.

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