Posted by I purchased and refurbished a Stanley # 4 1/2 plane for my brother’s birthday. There were too many sharp angles to simply wrap in paper, and I couldn’t find a cardboard box the correct size. Ahh I thought, I’ve got an afternoon spare and some left over timber from building the pergola, why not make a box to house it.
I had the remnants of some 45×190 mm pine beams which I re-sawed down to roughly 12 mm panels on the bandsaw, then cleaned up to a finished 10 mm stock. The joints were through dovetails which I’m rather pleased with. I’ve not done dovetails in pine since I was learning, and found it really tricky to cut the pine cleanly with both the saw and chisels. In that time though, I’ve learned to sharpen and set my saw, and over time the sharpness of my chisels has improved with the addition of a final strop stage. Now the pine cuts rather than mashes under the sharp edges. Tangible progress in my woodworking journey.
Because of the sliding lid, I needed to chamfer the lid to fit in the dado, which gave it a nice profile. It does look a little odd when closed though.
I didn’t decorate the box, hence it’s a plain plane box.
Lessons learned?
- Full length dados don’t work with through dovetails. I’m going to have to learn to do mitred dovetails (even just mitring the end pins) to hide the end of the dado.
- Make a fence for my old #78 plane so that I have a method of creating rebates for lids in future (or just be done with it and order that Veritas small plough plane I’ve been procrastinating over).
- When using a cheap Empire combination square, a bad worker really can blame his tools. Time to get a square square.
Lance
September 2019
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