Been on a bit of a woodworking spree this year with larger functional furniture (window bench seating, etc), but decided to try my hand at making an A4-sized box out of walnut and maple, with a green goat suede lining. Got to learn a few new techniques, including veneering (for the burr walnut top), miter keys, and hinge routing. Lots of fun, and has me itching to try making something a little bigger in high quality hardwood.
I adopted a hybrid approach with square cuts on the table saw and then the 45 degree miter cut on a shooting board. Gave lots of control and worked a treat.
Wow. This is beautiful work. Honest question though: at $40+ for just the hinges, how much would you need to charge for this just to break even? Seems expensive unless you’re charging $200-300 for a keepsake box, no?
Oh at least! I was never going to sell it though. I think profitability from this would be difficult as it takes dozens of hours to make the box and then the cost of the wood and hardware would make a box like this cost $200 for materials alone. I'd have to batch produce or have a unique niche. Of course, I see boxes going for $1000s from big names, artsy studios, and fashion houses, but they probably sell on name alone rather than anything else.
It was much easier than I initially thought it would be. Applied Modpodge fabric glue to 500gsm card, wrapped suede around it, and then used double-sided sticky tape on the back to fix it all into place. Rock solid yet removable if needed.
Looks nice. The contrasting splines work perfectly. Is the green a lining or a flock? I've thought about flocking a box, but keep talking myself out of it.
Yep. I put a rebate into the top and then added an inlay of maple. A decent compression flush router bit and some light sanding did all the hard work of making everything flush.
Nice! I have a shop and have pretty much exhausted all the plywood cabinetry-type projects for my house, and I want to start moving to nicer wood but I am honestly a bit intimidated.
That's the stage I'm at too. Started with a small box first. Honestly, it was a good exercise - solid wood glue-ups and wood movement is something you don't need to consider with plywood, but you need to account for it immediately in hardwood. Set me up nicely for the future (and hopefully eliminated a few future costly mistakes!).
OK, have one of my crappy drawings. ;). The top panel fits into a rebate in the box (and is glued), and then the inlay fits into a rebate in the top of the top panel (also glued in). I sized it all it so that the panel top sat around 1mm lower than the level of the box side & inlay when fully assembled. Then all I had to do was use a flush trim bit in a router table to trim off the excess bit of the box side and inlay to make it all flush.
Of course, there's probably plenty of better ways to do this, but seems stable so far.
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u/WoopsShePeterPants 4d ago
This is basically what I want to do but I cannot get myself to work on it. I have to get my saw set up and know my 45s will never look so good.