Make a simple box with hand tools.

hey welcome to woodwork for humans the series where we make great things out of wood using some very minimal tools last week we worked on the frame for this dovetailed wooden box and boxes are an excellent project for beginning or intermediate woodworkers because you don't have to be a great woodworker to make one and they're an excellent skill builder and when you know how to make a basic box it's not very difficult to scale that up into a drawer a chest a cabinet even a dresser when you think about it half the furniture in your house is just big wooden boxes man that's crazy the dovetails that i cut for this box are not perfect but that's not a big deal because little gaps are easy to fix i'll start by taking my scrub plane and cutting some thick shavings off the edge of a scrap board later on i can cut these into small chips of wood that i can easily slide in and fill the gaps left in my joints once everything's ready for glue up i take a minute and transfer the letters of each joint over to the end grain of the boards this way i'll still be able to see them during the glue up process but they'll get planed away when everything's done now my stock is pretty beat up from all the sawing and chiseling and cutting i did to make these joints so i want to give everything a light finish pass with the plane i did the outside of all the boards which is okay but i also did the inside of one of the boards and that was really stupid of me because cleaning the inside surface can mess up your joint and give you gappy awkward shoulders luckily i only did this to one of the boards so it is a totally recoverable mistake but be smarter than me if you're going to finish playing the boards stick to the outside or just wait until after glue up when it'll be safe for gluing these joints up you only need a little bit of glue dovetails even mediocre ones hold themselves together pretty well with no glue at all so you want to concentrate on the long grain surfaces and just put a little bit of glue on the end grain this is mostly to hide gaps the end grain doesn't have a lot of holding power now a really good dovetail hardly needs any clamps at all but my dovetails are only okay and the clamps are going to allow me to put a bit of pressure on the joints and close up a lot of the little gaps i have too much pressure and you'll snap your pins but just a little bit of clamping pressure hides many sins if you find you have gaps that the clamps can't comfortably squeeze shut don't try too hard we cut all those slivers of wood and we can use those to fill up any problem areas after the glue dries as you're gluing and clamping you might find that your board also needs a little pressure on the tails and a nice c-clamp is really useful for that when i'm all done with the clamping my box looks a little bit like a porcupine with all these things sticking off of it but future boxes aren't going to need this treatment because my joints will get better and they'll need a lot less clamping during glue up and once the dovetail box comes out of the clamps any little remaining gaps i didn't fill in with wood chips can be filled with a quick mixture of glue and sawdust once that's sanded flush it'll be surprisingly invisible while the box assembly dries i'm going to work on the top and the bottom just like in our last video i prepare my components with fast cross cuts and i mark all the components from the first one i cut that means they're all going to be the same size with no measuring i chose good straight boards for this project and so there's no need to joint the edges i just glue them and clamp them up and i'm going to get a clean joint i use my best cleanest boards for the top and any old scrap wood for the bottom nobody really pays attention to box bottoms both my top and bottom come out of the clamps looking great but they're too thick and chunky if i leave them like this the box is going to be awkward looking and clumsy so i want them to be thinner to give the box a little bit more of an elegant look overall this is a great time to practice dimensioning stock by hand people think this is a huge headache but it's really not bad at all you'll want to gauge a half inch depth line all the way around the board and darken it in with a pencil to make it easy to see then you can take your scrub plane and plane a bevel down to these lines that gives you an easy visual reference all around the board and with everything beveled down to the gauge lines all you have to do is plane off the waste in between those bevels we're going to start out by traversing which is a fancy way of saying we're going to go across the board this gives us quick removal of material with minimal tear out and when i'm close to my lines i'm going to flip the board lengthwise keep my scrub plane and go with the grain when your bevels disappear you can switch to your smoothing plane i'm using my grizzly plane here i reviewed this two weeks ago as part of my all summer long hunt for the best affordable smoother you can watch that video and i'll have a couple more plane reviews before the summer is over using a finely set smoothing plan like this allows me to get right down to my lines and end up with a flat nice finish with no tear out when i was doing the glue up for my top and bottom of my box i left these pieces long intentionally that gives me wiggle room later on to fit them to whatever i want i'll set my box on the lid or the bottom and give myself a nice overhang all the way around all the exact measurements are in the plans and you can grab those at rexkrueger.com store or click the link down in the description all my plans are super affordable after i like the margins on my top and bottom i'll strike my lines cross cut my waist and shoot everything square on my shooting board now i want to put round overs on my top and bottom this is going to give a nice finished look and add a lot of chip resistance to those sharp edges especially using a soft wood like pine you might think you need a router to cut nice round over details but you can do a great job with just a hand plane and a little sandpaper i'm going to start by doing my round over details on the ends of my boards because these are the most likely to blow out while i'm planning i'll nip a little bevel on the far end and skew the plane i'll plane my round over in with a slightly circular motion and judge the shape by eye it's all you need to get a clean curve then i'll flip the board around do the opposite end and just make them match by looking at them you can do a great job just with your eyeballs i didn't get any blowout while i was doing these roundovers but if it does happen leaving the long grain edge for last will allow you to plane any damage away very easily once your bevels are finished you can sand them with some 180 grit sandpaper and they come out looking great just as nice as anything i've ever done with a machine tool this box is simple and the top and bottom are exactly the same so just plain the bevels to match on both pieces and you're done now we're in the home stretch of our project all the components are made and we're ready for assembly i've intentionally left the joints on my dovetails a little bit proud and they need to be planed down you'll want a sharp iron and a fine set to your plane go slowly and creep up on a final flush surface now at this point i noticed that my box is not exactly square so my top and bottom look a little bit odd this is no big deal i'm just going to trace the out of square edge onto my top and bottom pieces and plane them down to match the box frame no one will ever notice and then especially because this project is pine and it's a little bit soft it's gotten very dinged up from the whole assembly process the whole thing benefits from a nice light sanding you can wrap a piece of sandpaper around a block to keep everything straight and square i did a little bit of it that way but then i just broke out the random orbital sander to speed things up sanding this project gives it a nice clean finished look and once all the parts are surfaced i can glue on the bottom and clamp it you can finish off a box like this with some super cheap hinges i grabbed these at the big box store and they were under two dollars and came with the screws i will link to something similar down in the description place your hinges on the lid an inch or two inches in from either edge and mark them with a knife you want to make several light cuts to get a deep line all the way around the hinge then take a chisel bevel down and use light taps across the grain to slowly loosen that waste in chips then go in from the side and clean it out with a nice flat bottom repeat this process a couple of times until the hinge sits flush with the underside of the lid because we're using soft white pine here you can just prick the screw holes with an awl and run the screws in by hand or even better drill some little pilot holes and put a little bit of wax or bar soap on the threads of your screws you're going to need to get them out later for finishing you don't want them stripping once everything's cut and clean you can install your hinges and you know what started as a simple basic project ended up looking better than expected it's not perfect but the whole thing has a nice crisp organic look to it it's a lot better than i thought it would be i think it's good enough to give for a gift i probably gonna give this to my daughter and i bet she'll love it i've made a lot of boxes before but generally with machine tools this is the first one i've done entirely by hand and it is a fantastic skill building project if you're even thinking about doing something like this i recommend you dive into it with no hesitation it's not very difficult and your skills will go way up from the effort now for me since i finished making this box i feel like i want to make a bunch more i'll probably do them with more complex dovetail joinery but i'm really interested what my viewers think about this how do you approach doing a simple box what joint do you use rabbit a box joint what's easy what looks good what do you think the best way to make a simple boxes let me know down in the comments and then obviously since i made this box out of pine it's really going to need a finish to hold up and finishing is just this gigantic super complicated topic so next week i'm going to do my best to compress it down and make it manageable by focusing on a couple of durable easy inexpensive finishes so meet me back here at 2 30 next week for the premiere of my guide to basic wood finishing before i go i always have to thank my patrons on patreon they're the ones who make it possible for me to do things like learn new joints and do projects entirely by hand whereas before when i was a custom builder i had to use machines to get things done fast get them out the door and get paid now because of the support i get from my patrons i'm focusing on the finer aspects of the craft and learning all sorts of things that i never had the time for before if you'd like to support this kind of approachable diy content go on over to patreon.com rex krueger and check out the early access exclusive content and bonuses that i have just for my patrons and of course i always want to thank my viewers because without them well i'd just be some guy in his basement talking to a camera which i kind of am but still thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 210,838

Keywords: box, box making, hand tool, hand tool woodworking, dovetail, scrub plane, thickness planer, sawing, design, easy, beginner, diy, make, maker

Id: qgqlAKT83pQ

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019