I wanted to make something for myself that was reflective of some of the additional woodworking skills I have acquired over the last year. Storage for odd and ends on my dresser lead me to creating a heirloom wooden box that included elements of inlay, veneering, fine box craft, and as mentioned before a little something else secretive and hidden.

Walnut is one of my favorite woods and it so happens I had a big enough piece left over from another project that would work for this one. My veneering on this box will be the small quad and book matched panel I did in veneering class, something a little special to me as it was my first veneering practice piece that turned out nice. This panel will form the lid of the box that will have initial dimensions of 11×7x4.5 inches and some of the other elements I will design as I build this project.

Another key feature of this box will be the use of a Celtic knot inlay design. I saw these designs on some jewelry in San Francisco last fall and thought how interesting they would be done in wood. The final knot pattern or location has yet to be decided but the Internet is an excellent source for ideas, patterns, and drawing techniques.

So when making a box I like to plan my cuts to maximize the overall look of the box with the wood grain, to do this I lay the board out and with a ruler try to determine my best pattern and mark it up with white chalk. You can see my top panel also in the photo as well, which I keep handy when planning my pieces. I ended up cutting some of the board off at one end to save this for later pieces such as the base and tray.

Once I decided on the best look given my dimensional cuts, I took the board over to the jointer and planner for squaring and thickening. The thickness was about 9/16″ and squared down to my 4 1/2″ wide (box height). Then I cross cut my box sides out making sure I cut them in the left, front, right, back order to maintain the wood grain across three corners of the box. I could have made four corners match by resawing but was not concerned to do so with the inlay on the box that will draw the eyes. I also cross cut my pieces first then mitered them to make life easier. Just make sure you have each to the two matching sides the same size, a good miter gage and stop block helps with perform this. Here is a photo of my cut and matched pieces.

With this completed you can set about mitering the edges, just make sure you decide first what is your inside and outside face and maintain the grain direction/pattern. I use a good quality miter gage again on the tablesaw with the blade titled to 45 degrees, then sneaked up on the cut till perfectly mitered with little or no loss to the board outside size. Once you have this miter cut determined keep your stop block set and cut the other matching sides.

Once i have all the pieces mitered I like to check the fit by using packing tape to tape the sides together and fold the box to completed shape. Here it is with the top, not too bad so far, I am happy with the start.

Now some more design work, I need to lay out my cuts for the box bottom and tray supports, since I decide I will use only one tray and leave much of the box open for larger items on my dresser. I do not want a drawer so my life got a whole lot easier. I do need to plan the lid and lid cut, along with the space for the hidden compartment. I scratched out some notes on paper and came up with an initial plan that I am going to have to start sticking to on things like bottom and tray supports after I cut grooves. You can see one of the Celtic knot designs on the back of the paper showing though in the upper right corner.

The bottom and tray supports will be 1/8″ thick so my blade kerf can groove them out quickly. I set the fence and blade height and went to work, note the tray supports will only be on the sides of the box, I did this to ensure no interference with locks, etc and not to look so bulky. Here are the completed pieces from this weekends work.

Next weekend I hope to rabbet out the top set in and part of the secret compartment and potentially assemble the box, but I may still wait to do assembly till I have my inlay work done. I still need to decide on a final design and placement while learning to draw Celtic knots and plan out how to cut them as inlay. Ahhh I smell another woodworking challenge, the fun part of a project.