Little Box

[woodbloke52]

A small box using Laburnum 'oyster' veneers, which was very tricky to do and nearly became bandsaw fodder on more than one occasion:

Lot's of elementary 'skool boy' errors as I'd never done this sort of veneering before. Holly is great to work but is difficult to keep clean and unforgiving of joint discrepancies. Accosted by SWIMBO for her watches. Glad it's dun! - Rob

 

[foxbat]

little boxes can be so much more difficult than larger pieces as the tolerances decrease with the size; the hinge is really nice touch - any chance of 'a lessons learnt' with the veneers?

 

[woodbloke52]

little boxes can be so much more difficult than larger pieces as the tolerances decrease with the size; the hinge is really nice touch - any chance of 'a lessons learnt' with the veneers?

The veneering was 'awkward' as I wasn't sure how to go about it, so I sliced up the squared branch on the bandsaw into roughly 2mm thick bits. Before each slice was taken, the material was shot square on the shooting board so at least I had one flat surface per slice. These were then made into a dry 'lay up' using strong 3M tape to pull everything together; each lay up was then glued to a very thin aero ply substrate (about 1.5mm thick) which gave me some solid blanks to work with. After prepping to size, each of the blanks was glued to the box material, in this case Swiss Pear. One of the daft things I did was to stuff the aero ply/laburnum veneers through the drum sander as they'd warped; what I should have done is to drum sand them once they were stuck to the Swiss Pear. In hindsight, what I ought to have done is to stick the 'oyster layup' directly to the Swiss Pear which might have saved a lot of faff and angst in the long run - Rob