puttering about...

Hinge mortises routed in the lid and body of a box.

I have been working in the shop, finishing boxes that I started at Marc Adams School of Woodworking, and starting a couple more.

This coming week, in addition to beginning to move tools and benches from my old school woodworking shop into a classroom on the Clear Spring School campus, I will finish the bases for the Arkansas Governor's Quality Awards.

The wonderful thing about having a wood shop is the opportunity to putter about at doing small things. There's nothing grand when it comes to box making, as a box (unless you're making lots of them) can be made in a day or less time.  My students at Marc Adams demonstrated the truth of that by making a variety of boxes over the course of the  5 day class. The great thing about boxes is that once beautifully made, and if cared for, they can last near forever. So the fun you've had puttering about at box making is a heap different from the time folks spend piddling on their iPads. The photos of puttering are as follows:

Cut the channel, fit the strip and glue.

Above, fitting of hinges can be done on the router table using my story stick technique, even when the lid is slightly over-sized from the dimensions of the body of the box.

I am making a couple inlaid post office box banks, using old post office combination lock doors. One will be for our local Carnegie Public Library to serve as a donations box, and to replace one that I made that had been stolen earlier in the year.

I used strips of inlay that I made years ago, and routed channels for them to fit. It helps to work in pairs at least, so that in gluing, two can be aligned face to face and pressure evenly applied. The challenge in these boxes will be to cut carefully so as to have the inlay travel continuously around the box.

Make, fix, and create...

Sides for boxes, with inlay clamped face to face