A butterfly box
Skip in Falls Church
>Before *some* people on *some* message board diverted me onto saw sharpening and saw handles, I was almost done with a set of boxes for my wife. I still need to do one more piece (a long tray to fit inside the upper part of the box) to complete the set but this is what I have to this point.
I found a couple of pieces of Honduran rosewood in a local wood place. I wasn't really looking for them – but they found me, if you know what I mean. It was obvious that they could be book matched and when you put them together my wife and I could see a butterfly in one section. The two boards were about 3.5 feet long, a little over 4 inches wide and were nominally ½ inch, lightly surfaced on one side. The bad part is they were cupped, bowed and twisted. I suspect few people in their right mind would have bothered with them – so naturally they followed me home.
It seemed to me that walnut really matched up well with the rosewood so I decided to use the walnut to frame rosewood panels with the butterfly making up the top. The front/back panels and the side panels are essentially mirror images of each other as well. I used mortise and tenons to join the frames. Planing the rosewood was a real pain - especially because I wanted to keep as much of the match as possible. Most of the wood came off what would eventually be the inside of the box. All of the pieces turned out to be slightly different thicknesses.
I rabbeted and dadoed the panels and turned the raised parts inward. I wanted supports about halfway up the two long sides so I could have two different levels for boxes inside. I didn't want to just glue the supports on the sides so I made a quarter inch groove in what would be the inside of the long panels and used a full length spline joint and glue to join the supports to the sides. I used quarter inch baltic birch plywood for the bottom.
I also (to this point) have made 3 smaller boxes two out of walnut and one out of some really wild black walnut. All of them are dovetailed together and finished with varnish over shellac. They fit fairly snugly into the bottom of the box. I plan on finishing the project up with a top tray made of some tamer rosewood I have left over. (If I can tear myself away from saw handles.)
The pictures I took don't show the butterfly too well - but if you look, you can see it. The inside of the top looks like a distorted face of some type - if you look hard enough. Of course the key thing is that my wife said she'd break the arm of anyone that tried to take it away from her. She's planning on using it to keep her varied and assorted sewing stuff in.
Oh, and I got a large piece of (mostly) 4/4 quarter sawn curly maple this weekend - for saw handles. :)
Skip
