Hello All,
My daughter’s 32nd birthday is coming up, and I wanted to make a nice jewelry box for her. I chose dark walnut for the sides and hard maple for the front/back to emphasize the hand cut dovetails.
I have been buying rough lumber for previous projects and milling it myself to save money, but it’s been hit or miss with the quality and figure of the wood, so I bought S3S lumber to see exactly what I was getting. Even though I still need to mill the lumber to my specs, I’m using this approach going forward.
I found a small piece of Bolivian Rosewood and loved the figure, so I resawed it and laminated it to a 1/2” thick piece of MDF for the center section of the top. Followed with a thin strip of Maple, a thicker strip of Wenge, with the Maple border.
The lid is attached to the box with Rob Cosman’s wood hinge technique. If you’re interested you can search on Youtube, as he explains it far better than I can. It’s a very finicky process. I ran several tests, and I was reasonably happy with the end result, but it’s not perfect. When it is perfect, as is usually the case with Rob, the hinge is almost invisible when viewing the back of the box. The size of the dowel is critical, so that it fits the routed channels perfectly to insure a tight fit and a strong bond when glued. Because of the order of milling and assembly, you get one shot when glueing up the hinge, after spending hours cutting dovetails. If things go wonky, it’s back to square one.
I finished the box with Osmo PolyX Satin. I like this finish for Maple because it doesn’t yellow the wood too much, but still brings out the richness of the Walnut. Thanks for looking.
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