Presentation Box

 

This is what I've been working on for the last couple of days: a presentation box as part of a farewell gift for one of Annette's colleagues who is leaving.

I'm not 100% sure what the timber is, but I think it's probably matai. I got it from an old flooring joist, and matai was used a lot for that sort of thing. The splines are white oak.

The plaque is copper, deep-etched with a manaia design.

It's a fairly crappy photograph, but I just snapped it with my phone by room light, so I guess you reap what you sow.

Farewell Box

 

I made this box for Annette to give away as a leaving gift for one of her workers who is moving on to pastures new. The top is spalted beech, the sides are rimu, and the corner splines are ash. The cartouche is copper, etched with a design of the Manaia.

The inside is lined with cedar, and in the bottom is black suede leather.

Dimensions are 240 x 135 x 70 mm.

Yet Another Box

 

I felt an urge to make something, and for want of anything else to make, I made another box.

What I'm going to keep in it I have no idea, but no doubt something will arise.

It's made out of really terrible cheap 7mm and 9mm plywood that had become badly water-stained at some point, so I decided to paint it rather than staining it as I normally would.

It's large enough for A4 paper in the bottom, and its external dimensions are 345 x 255 x 90 mm.

Inside

Inside the inside

I included a partitioned tray, about 30mm deep.

The floors are all lined with self-adhesive 1mm thick foam. I had no pieces large enough to cover the whole floor of the box, so I cobbled it together out of pieces of whatever colours I had available.

Shoe Shine Box

 

Yesterday, I went to use our shoe-cleaning stuff, and finally got fed up with the ratty old cardboard box that we've been keeping it all in for the last thirty years or so.

So I whacked together this box out of scraps of 12mm pine plywood I had lying around, and a handle cut down from an old broomstick.

The little shelf is there to rest your foot on while you're brushing away at your shoe. It's supported underneath by a fairly hefty pine bracket, so it's a lot sturdier than it looks from above. The little curved cutout in the top edge of the divider serves no real function; it's just there because I think it looks nicer than a straight line.

If I had any self-respect, I'd fill all those screw holes. Maybe in another thirty years.

Pintle Hinged Box

I'm in the process of making yet another box to keep stuff in. Here it is being made all shiny and black.

It's just MDF, so nothing special there, but I thought I would try a thing: I cut a regular hinge in half to make a pair of pintle hinges (I used an old flush hinge, though a butt hinge would work as well or better). The idea with the pintle hinges is that I can then remove the box lid entirely, or leave it hinged to the body as need be.

I have learned a couple of things from this exercise:

1. that my soldering skills could do with a lot more practice because they are really shit, and
2. that one pintle should be left longer than the other so that you can engage them one at a time, instead of having to get them both lined up at once to assemble them.

Scrabble Box

Every household needs a box to keep their Scrabble set in, and this is now ours.

The original cardboard box finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated, so I made a new one, a bit sturdier than the old.

This is the first time I've tried a faux-finish. The top and bottom are just 6mm MDF that I've stained with a grain pattern, then shellacked and waxed. The sides are some bits of 8mm oak tongue-and-groove* I had lying around, and the inside is paint.

The most expensive part of the whole thing was the brass fittings, which cost an unreasonable amount of money. I would have liked to have had a bright brass latch as well, but I didn't have one handy, and I wasn't going to pay an exorbitant amount to get one.

* Actually some groove-and-groove. The reason I had it in my wood-pile is because somebody fucked up and then threw it in the rubbish.

Scrap Box — Complete

I finished off the little box I was making for Annette, and I'm reasonably pleased with it.

Dimensions are 175 x 110 x 55 mm.

I inlaid a bit of copper I'd etched with my logotype a couple of years ago into the lid; it's quite corroded (that's the black bits), and I'm not sure quite how it will age, but we'll see.

One thing I'd like to do is find some more attractive latches and hinges. These ones are OK, and they work well, but they're pretty uninspiring.

The inside is lined with cedar from some old venetian blinds. It's very soft, and not very strong, but for this purpose it works very well. The bottom is a piece of 1/8" sapele plywood set into a rebate in the walls, so there's a couple of millimetres clearance underneath.