Chris Knight
Established Member
You know the sort - basically a nice simple job where everything goes wrong? Having just joined a local group of carvers, I needed something to cart a few chisels back and forth. I should have stuck with chisel rolls, they are very economical on space but I wanted something that kept the chisels from touching each other, hence this travelling box.
Problems started straight away when several hours of frustration on the Woodrat revealed I was trying to dovetail with a bit that had the approximate shape of a coke bottle - the tails came out beautifully curvaceous but my pins alas, were straight . In the end I cut the joints by hand. If I had waited a day then I would have been able to use the new bits that the Postie delivered from Woodrat. What started as a nice wrap-around grain was more than somewhat buggered when I cut pins in the wrong piece and had to swap it for a tail piece. In trying to sort everything out and getting a couple back to front in the process, any matching of the grain is purely coincidental.
The inlay in the top started as a 2mm inlay but when I scraped it level, what had been black turned out to be a yukky grey colour - ho hum. I did have some real ebony but I then needed to recut the grooves for a larger strip. This done I knocked the top off the bench just so I could have a nice dent in it - I think the technical term is "distressed" and while the piece is not an antique I reckoned as I had more or less copied the thing from a picture of an old one, that distressed was OK.
And so it went on. I won't bore you with any more tales of woe except to mention that it is the only woodwork I have done where something is held in place with knicker elastic! In this case it is the chisels in the lid. Chisels come in so many shapes and sizes and I found that to accommodate them all was taking more trouble than I would have believed possible but knicker elastic did the trick. Fortunately I did foresee some problems in this area so made the racks in the lid and the box removable which was just as well because they have been in and out like the proverbial.
All I need to do now is fit a box lock when that arrives from a supplier and some sort of carrying strap. Then I plan to finish it with waterborne acrylic.
Knicker elastic just visible
The fall flap enables me to get at the chisels in the body of the box
Problems started straight away when several hours of frustration on the Woodrat revealed I was trying to dovetail with a bit that had the approximate shape of a coke bottle - the tails came out beautifully curvaceous but my pins alas, were straight . In the end I cut the joints by hand. If I had waited a day then I would have been able to use the new bits that the Postie delivered from Woodrat. What started as a nice wrap-around grain was more than somewhat buggered when I cut pins in the wrong piece and had to swap it for a tail piece. In trying to sort everything out and getting a couple back to front in the process, any matching of the grain is purely coincidental.
The inlay in the top started as a 2mm inlay but when I scraped it level, what had been black turned out to be a yukky grey colour - ho hum. I did have some real ebony but I then needed to recut the grooves for a larger strip. This done I knocked the top off the bench just so I could have a nice dent in it - I think the technical term is "distressed" and while the piece is not an antique I reckoned as I had more or less copied the thing from a picture of an old one, that distressed was OK.
And so it went on. I won't bore you with any more tales of woe except to mention that it is the only woodwork I have done where something is held in place with knicker elastic! In this case it is the chisels in the lid. Chisels come in so many shapes and sizes and I found that to accommodate them all was taking more trouble than I would have believed possible but knicker elastic did the trick. Fortunately I did foresee some problems in this area so made the racks in the lid and the box removable which was just as well because they have been in and out like the proverbial.
All I need to do now is fit a box lock when that arrives from a supplier and some sort of carrying strap. Then I plan to finish it with waterborne acrylic.
Knicker elastic just visible
The fall flap enables me to get at the chisels in the body of the box
What did you use to cut the inlay grooves with? I have tried making and using a scratch stock before now but have never managed an accurate consistent line to be honest. 
