today in the wood shop

I've begun a whole bunch of boxes in my shop as it's important to connect with my own inner drive to create. Yesterday I resawed inch-thick ash lumber to form the sides, and today I'll begin vacuum laminating veneers to 1/8 in. Baltic birch plywood to form the top panels. The combination of veneers and solid woods give a box that's strong and light. Beautiful, too.

In the Clear Spring School wood design studio, I'm still in the design mode myself. Yesterday we put up more pegboard for hanging tools, installed a French cleat along one wall and began adding shelves that will also provide for coat hooks at differing heights to meet the needs of our full age and size range of our kids.

In my January beginning box making class at ESSA, one of my students brought in a box that he'd bought at our local thrift store for $20 bucks. Normally that would be a lot to pay for such a thing, but he'd recognized it as being one that I'd made and that had originally sold for several times the price.

The hinges were bent but I bent them back. It was a one-of-a-kind box, done as a demonstration of techniques in an earlier class. You can read a bit about that specific box in an earlier blog post here: https://wisdomofhands.blogspot.com/2014/08/piddle-about.html The box has a number of interesting features intended to illustrate a variety of techniques.

Make, fix and create... Assist others in learning lifewise.