brainwagon

You would think that with the shelter-in-place orders that we are all under, that I would have had a lot of time and energy to get back to blogging again. I mean for the last eight weeks, I’ve been having to find ways to entertain myself, and in the past blogging has been part of what I would entertain myself. And yet for the better part of the last eight weeks, I’ve basically blogged about nothing.

Which isn’t to say I’ve been doing nothing. Close to nothing, but not actually nothing. My last post was about experiments with AREDN, the Amateur Radio Emergency Digital Network. I’ve still been playing with that, and have got a new Raspberry Pi 4 to add to that network. I’m working toward creating a portable node that will be entirely solar powered. But that’s not today’s project.

I’ve been continuing to tinker with tools. Even in quarantine, I managed to find some tools for sale via Facebook Marketplace, and picked up four rusty planes that I spent a couple of evenings cleaning, de-rusting and sharpening. I have been working on converting a ratty 4×8 sheet of plywood into a rolling stand I can put my Work Sharp sharpening station on.

And, beginning last night, I started working on making a box. At this point, I’d normally insert a picture of the work in progress, but I doubt it would impress any of you. But for now, it will be a box about 12″ long x 5″ x 5″, and is in the style of Japanese toolboxes. If you just search for “Japanese toolbox” on Google, you’ll find hundreds of examples, many quite elaborate and fancy, some very basic. One of the more basic examples with instructions can be found from Make Magazine #34.

https://makezine.com/projects/make-34/japanese-toolbox/

And yet, the very first comment included this:

Sigh.

It really makes me sad (and faintly insecure) to read comments like this. Because I’ve probably spent eight or ten hours in the last week doing nothng but thinking about boxes. Not just boxes, but this particular style of box.

In a sense, this is just about one of the simplest forms of boxes you can make. There is no fancy joinery like dovetails or finger joints. They are not traditionally made from expensive hardwoods, since they were first of all a box to safely stash their saws and chisels. They were not even typically glued, and were instead held together with nails. If you want to see the basic idea, this video from “lemongrasspicker” on YouTube is a pretty good intro:

If you get to around 4:45 in the video, you’ll see him attach the feet (really just two battens) by nailing them on and then simply bending them over to clinch the bottom to the feet. This is actually also traditional, even though it probably offends our modern sensibilities.

You’ll also note that he manages to get a split in the board as he’s resawing it. Rather than chucking that piece of wood onto the scrap pile and trying again, he simply glues it back together and moves on. One of the things about this design is that it’s not supposed to generate a lot of ridiculous waste. I find that pleasant as well.

Woodworking is actually all about problem solving. What is the order of operations? How am I going to cut this accurately? How can I fix my mistake? How can I hide a mistake I can’t fix? How can I draw inspiration from other designs? How does my choice of material (or just this board) affect the overall design?

Someone who sarcastically says “you built a box, dude” has never built a box, or even given any thought to what it means to be build a box.

So, I had planed and cut some pieces of pine that I had that were around 5″ wide and 27″ long down to roughly 5/8″. I decided to make the overall box 12″ long. It probably won’t be for tools, but might be used to store some small items. I’m mostly doing it just to continue practicing my skills. Last night I glued the two sides to the bottom. Unlike the video above where the sides sit atop the bottom and are nailed in from the bottom. I attached the sides to the side of the bottom and attached it with glue. I also bored several small holes and pinned the bottom in place using bamboo skewers.

I’ve been pondering the rest of the project. The lid on these boxes are moderately clever, and can even be made to lock in place. I’m debating whether I should give that a try. I might make a simple lid, and then later try to do the beveling operations to make the locking wedge.

But in any case, boxes are interesting. In fact, a lot of woodworking is just different techniques for making boxes of different sorts. To dismiss it as trivial likely means that your understanding of the tools and techniques are only the most superficial.

I’ll get some photos of it when its a bit further along.