12 Step Apple Box

hey everyone alex here welcome to the band saw life today i want to show you a simple yet unique box it's a little puzzle box in the shape of an apple now this box you can't take apart unless you pull that worm out the only way we can pull that worm out is to use a magnet which i've put into the stem pull that worm up slide that lid just like that we've got a simple little apple box or trick box depending on what you want to call it now i'm going to go through on how i made these there are two different ways that i use which is number one a solid piece of wood this is a piece of cypress which was extremely dry you got to make sure that stuff's dry it'll crack the easiest way to do it and the way i'm going to show you today is by gluing few boards together so that you can get a solid piece that you know is dry now this one works the same way stem comes off worm comes out lid slides and opens so let's get started i'm going to glue three pieces of cedar together these are not perfect pieces of material matter of fact when you're doing bandsaw boxes use your scraps up there's no reason why you can't use a piece of wood like this for a bandsaw box and you'll notice that the center piece has a little knot in it that's okay when i cut this apple out the middle of it's going to go away not worried about that knot and i've kind of determined out of all the pieces here that i like this for the front so i've traced my apple onto the front now today i'm going to be using a new glue if you haven't tried this really cool stuff it's a tight bond speed set now it dries much faster than any of their other glues you want to make sure you your uh get everything put together uh properly because once it starts to set up just a few minutes and it's really solid great stuff only comes in gallon and oh my god which is the size that i've got here i've already poured some into a little cup now i'm also going to use this simple little brush by tight bond pretty handy to have in the shop you can see there are silicone brushes on the end here that's so that glue really doesn't stick to it even after it dries got a little scraper on the other end now remember when you apply glue you only apply glue to one side of the wood i know a lot of people would prefer to see that glue on both sides problem is especially on a glue that dries this quickly is it will soak in and dry and then the only thing you're really holding that wood together with is the glue and what you really want is glue and fibers holding that wood together that way it's a much tighter bond no pun intended flip that over i'm not going all the way down to the bottom no need to whenever i'm gluing always keep a wet rag around uh helps to kind of keep your fingers clean but also helps to kind of wipe all that glue free and keep your surfaces clean as well so all right now i'm going to use a couple of quick grips here we don't need a whole lot for this i mean it's just three little old pieces of wood we want them solid i do love my bessie clamps we'll let that dry and we'll get to cutting all right now i've got my blank out of the clamps only took about 15-20 minutes for it to dry now what i'm going to be using today is a 1 8 inch 14 tooth per inch blade made by carter products i've also got the blade stabilizer on here so that i can do much tighter radiuses so let's go ahead and get the outside of that cut so now we've got our blank and we can see what our apples basically going to look like now what i would suggest that you do before you go any further is get those edges sanded nice and smooth it'll just save you a lot when you get ready to kind of finish it up and it's a lot easier to do the cuts where they're standing up if this is a little bit smoother all right now i've sanded my box close enough to where i can kind of hand sand it and finish it the next thing that you want to do is you want to cut the lid off now you can cut the back off first but that just makes it more narrow a little bit more less stable what i'm going to do is i want to stand this up on the widest point remember when you're cutting something like this it could roll into that blade so you want to be very careful now i'm going to take my pencil which anybody that's been to my shop knows that you can find a pencil on any machine in my shop i take a little rare earth magnet little heat shrink tube stick it to the pencil that way it's always available for me all right now we know that this is the front and what i'm going to do first is i want my lid probably a quarter of an inch or so and i'm just going to trace all the way around that just gives us a kind of a reference line now what we want to do is we want to come in and we want to leave our gap up here not down here if you cut the box out like this to where your curve is down you really have nothing to grip so we want to make sure that we cut our curve this way that way you've got something to pull out so kind of a common mistake it's a lot easier to do it this way but much tougher to open the box now again we want the widest part on the table it's a little tougher to cut it when it's like this plus the bottom has a little bit of an uneven bump the top is a little bit more straight up and down you don't have to follow this line exactly but kind of trace it on there so that you don't forget which way that has to be so you can see i've kind of curved in here curved in here so i'm going to cut in and follow my line around i've got my box sanded up i've drawn my line out and again we want to make sure that we get the broadest point here so make sure that that widest point of the apple is down now i've drawn my line in i'm going to come in cut so that i have that grip so we'll turn it this way that way you can see everything that's going on here [Music] so now we've got it nice and straight up and down slides in and out both sides next we need to cut that back off again we want to make sure that when we cut this we have the broadest area of support there now i've got my fence set for about a quarter of an inch just enough to take that back off and the reason that i've swapped to the straight cutting guides when we cut this back off nice and straight shouldn't have to do any sanding whatsoever yes there will be saw marks in there but they'll match up and everything will basically go back together seamless [Music] so [Music] so now we've cut the back off next we want to cut the inside out now when you cut this out make sure that you try to center this as close as possible for your end cut you can see on this one i got just a little bit further over than i wanted to so it makes this little pin here a little weaker so try to get it as centered as possible if you do get off you can glue it back on all right now i just have that centered right there bring that right over so i kind of know where to start into that drawer so now we know we've got it centered now you can just kind of stay as close as you want to the outside of that again i find it a lot easier to just simply kind of set my pencil and go right around that that way i'm not guessing how close i am to that edge gives it just a little cleaner look and again we don't have to follow this perfectly we just want to get it as close as possible now you'll notice when i got to the end of the cut i shut the saw down and i'm not moving it until the blade stops reason being is all it takes is to kind of get a little bit of that rough edge coming out and then your seam won't be so seamless all right the last thing that we've got to do before we glue this thing together is i've got to cut the lid off remember the top is just to keep it from coming open to make sure that we're not getting too thick or too thin the easy way to do this is to put this up against your fence roll it and then look from the back side and you can see where you're going to actually cut that box again we're going to use the widest point which is the top we've got it lined up [Music] and now we've got our lid now there is one more thing we want to take off of this and that's something for the lid to sit on so what i'm going to do is just shave a little bit off both sides that way we can glue it back into the box and we'll have our shelf so to speak for that lid to stay this 3 8 inch blade should do just fine now this would be your waist and remember the knot i talked about in the beginning that's gone these are going to be our shelf for our lid to sit on and we did get a little bit of that knot in there but gives it a little character not too much of it to where it has a hole now we've got all of our pieces that we cut first we cut the lid off then we cut the back off next we cut the inside out which gave us our lid off of the base this can be used to scraps or a handle or something else even get your apple stem out of there i prefer to go with the darker material but if you're going to paint it anyhow it doesn't really matter and then last i took a couple of these shoulder pieces off so that i could set those just inside there that way this lid has somewhere to sit and doesn't go all the way to the bottom so now all we have to do is glue this together first thing i like to do is glue this joint here and the reason being gives it a little bit of stability because if you don't get that glued up and you drop it and you crack it well you're pretty much starting over or you're going to have a crack in your apple so i'm going to get this lined up again we're going to use the speed set and i'll just open that just enough to get some glue down in there now i put just enough glue in there so that and i'm not sure if you can see this on the camera or not but when i squeeze it i want to see some of that glue come through to the other side if you don't see it just use your little scraper there kind of pry that glue back down into that and again we'll flip that over you can see that glue starting to come through that crack now that tells me i've gotten it all the way across we'll just take actually one of our speed clamps just enough pressure to where you can see just a little bit of that glue starting to squeeze out there we'll just set that aside and make sure that it's good and dry you can see that seam just about disappears next what we want to do is we want to glue the bottom into place now something that a lot of people kind of make the mistake of is they think well if i just get some of those burrs off there and clean it up a little bit it'll be a much tighter seam leave it alone just glue it back up especially if you've used a resaw or straight cut makes it a lot easier to just line everything back up what i usually look for are some specific grains or cut lines find yourself a nice spot which will show you right here i'm gonna kinda raise that up to the camera a little bit you should be able to see those grains real close that way you can see just how everything lines up we'll get that kind of where we want it i know that's the way it's going to go on so i'm going to lay that down take some more of our glue just get that nice and coated the outside we can wipe off the inside not really that big of a deal because we're going to flock the inside of the drawer and i'm going to go through that how that's done that way you can have a nice inside to your box without all that extra sanding and finishing trying to get the inside just right and again i'm going to look for that grain that i want to match up got it lined up the way that i want don't forget remember we closed up that gap so the lid or the back is going to be a little bit larger than the rest of the box that's okay try to get those grains matched up give it just a little snug remember this is a bandsaw box it doesn't take a whole lot all you're trying to do is just close those gaps up now if you put just a teeny bit of pressure on it you can also still kind of move it around a little bit if you have to to line those grains up now this looks like it closed up on the bottom all the way around give that just a little more the only place i see it still just a little bit apart is at the top so don't be surprised if you got to add a couple of extra clamps smaller clamps are easier to work with i will tell you i've run out of those so that's why i'm using some metal screw type clamps you can see i've closed that gap up and i'm gonna use one more to get that glue to squeeze out that side now everything does look good again it doesn't have to be super tight just make sure that it's closed the gaps and that little bit of glue easy to sand off not that big a deal and the reason that we use the quick set or tight bond uh any type really is it's much easier to sand than the super glues are super glues to me they tend to leach into the wood then when you sand it you have a darker area and a lighter area so i prefer the tight bond for just about any project and if i can get it within basically five minutes it's hard to beat this has been in the clamps for a good 15-20 minutes and we can see that all of our seams are nice and closed nice clean seam all we got to do is sand that down flush and it'll look like one piece again now just to make sure that we've got a decent fit i want to first put these pieces in here and since we're doing the inside of this um we're going to flock it which means we're going to paint it and then we're going to put the felt in there i'll use a little bit of this just for the sake of time and and i would probably do this as well if i were doing it uh by myself without a film crew so i'll just put a little dab in there remember it's not gonna take a whole lot just because we're gonna paint over this and the other nice thing about this type of glue is obviously a little spray and you're done put a little on this side so now we've got our shelves in there we'll test fit our lid drops right into place we'll test fit our sliding lid and everything fits back together just perfectly now we've got our box sanded nice and smooth everything slides the way that it's supposed to but before we drill our hole we're going to have to know what size hole we're going to actually need for that you're going to need to actually begin to make your pin now you can see i've got a just a simple pen that i've jb welded a ball to and i'll show you how i do this i'm going to take just a simple roll pin uh roll pins have a split in the side they're smooth you can get them pretty much any length that you want so if i just take that little roll pin kind of clamp it into place and then if you take a magnet stick that to the bottom well then you can take your ball bearing sticks right to the top and it's a lot easier to jb weld that if you've never used jb weld you can buy these pretty much anywhere any auto store walmart just basically mix the two together it's a 50 50 epoxy i glue that together and as you can see what we end up with is kind of a rough surface now jb weld sands pretty easy so all you have to do is just kind of smooth that out and then i know the size of my pin depending on what your roll pin is i know that this one ends up right at about five thirty seconds so i've got my drill bit at five thirty seconds and you can see also that once i've painted it green then you can just simply draw the face on there my wife what she usually does is uh i will paint them green and get them smooth and then she takes a sharpie first actually she puts the two white dots on there for the eyes and then she takes a sharpie and she dots the eyes puts the little eyebrow on the smiley face on there and we'll just put this up so that you can see a nice up close of that she really does a cute job with that all right so first we want to drill the smaller of the two remember we're going to go all the way through both lids this one and this one it lines them up and then all i have to do is take the top one off drill it larger for the worm to actually sit down in so we'll just make sure that we try to hit we don't want that rib so make sure you try to line it up i know that i'm going to basically be just below this color now you can use a drill press but accuracy is not real big here try to get it as straight up and down as possible you can see we went through both so if we were to put this in it would lock it but obviously we don't want that sticking up quite that much because you don't want somebody to be able to just grab that worm out of there i'm going to drill all the way through this the size of the worm so that it's sticking down and just the head is sticking up and it makes it difficult to pinch or pull up out of there now next we want to drill this out larger than the hole that's in the inner lid so i've got a bit at 11 30 seconds because that's what i measured that had to be is just a little bit smaller than 11 30 seconds so you can see that fits through there nicely now it doesn't quite go down in there far enough to stop somebody from grabbing that out so if you run into that situation we'll just use this magnet to pull that back out remember your lid or your inner lid is pretty thick so you can drill a little deeper into this one with the larger piece and that also locks everything together a little bit nicer now don't go all the way through don't make that mistake because if you do then you're going to have to go a little bit larger post so we'll drop that down in there drop that down in there then we'll see just how well that worm seats down in there now you may have to kind of maneuver that just a little bit just to line everything up make sure it's going down in there good just going to enlarge that inner hole just a little bit it's a little too tight so that slides in and out just a little bit easier and that's looking much better i know that the magnet that i'm going to use is a quarter inch size rare earth magnet so i know i want the stem to stick right about there so we'll just give that a quick mark now i'm also going to use a quarter inch forstner bit you want to use the exact same size forstner bit that your magnet is mainly when you uh do that and you press this into the wood it doesn't want to come back out if you do it larger and try to glue it or use a super glue uh inevitably it will eventually want to come back out we don't want to go too deep if you do go through it's not the end of the world is remember we're going to flock the inside of the drawer so you would never see it i know that's at least the depth of the thickness of that magnet so if i just take that press it right down into that hole it holds it just plenty tight for that stem to stick to what i make my stem out of is a piece of walnut something darker so that it does look like a stem i start with a much larger piece than i need this is about half inch by half inch maybe three quarter by three quarter and you can see i've already drilled my quarter inch hole right in the center the reason that we want to do it starting from this size it's very difficult to try to drill a very small area so i simply press that in just like i did on the apple and again you want now since this is hardwood it'll take just a little bit more to press that into place but you want to do that especially in this stem area because if you don't it will just pop back out of there until that is flush now it's obviously not going to stick real well because it's not concave like the apple is so at this point i begin sanding my sides getting it to where it rests completely flat you can take your band saw and just kind of cut that shape so that it looks a little bit more like a stem and get it down don't take too much of this away because if you do uh you'll expose the outer edge of that magnet and then it'll want to pop back out of there again you can add just a little bit of super glue with the pressing um it does help to hold it but again if it's not the same size to where you have to actually press it into the hole you're going to have a real hard time trying to get it to stay in there flocking is pretty easy to do we're going to need to put two coats on the inside of the drawer here reason being is if we do one coat and it soaks in in kind of different areas faster than the others then when you apply the flock it'll leave kind of patchy areas now normally i would tape up the top of this lid with some painters tape but since we have these swoops here it makes it very difficult to both tape and keep that paint off the edge so the best thing i can tell you is make your motions with your brush up never down that way you'll get very little on that edge and what you do get you can sand back off pretty easy so i'm just going to go ahead and get this inside painted one time then we'll come back and get the second coat on and block it all right now we've got it nice and covered i'm going to put a second on there and again the reason that we're doing this in two stages is because if it soaks in you're going to have a spot where the flock does not actually adhere to the inside of the drawer here so that's why you want to make sure you take the time to do this twice again always kind of pull up on those edges that way you don't have to do quite so much sanding or scraping to get that paint back off that top lip there we want that line as clean as possible now we've got it all nice and wet what i've done is i've put just a little bit of flock in a ziploc bag we just simply put that in the bag fill the drawer with the flock and shake it really good and what you're trying to do is embed the flocking into that paint we'll dump that out now you can see that flocking is just absolutely perfect throughout that box so we'll let that dry now i've blown this out to where the flock is any loose flock is now gone we can take our inner lid drop that into place slide that back into place take our worm drop him into place and now we've got our stem just like that one complete box i hope you all enjoyed this i hope to see several of these made thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Bandsaw Life

Views: 13,190

Rating: 4.9401708 out of 5

Keywords: bandsaw, bandsaw life, apple box, bandsaw box, Alex Snodgrass, Snodgrass method

Id: _2D_R8_U9iY

Length: 36min 48sec (2208 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021