A Box for Hand Warmers

This was my second attempt at making a box. My other half had asked for a box for storing some home-made knitted hand warmers. The box needed to be quite large to hold the hand warmers and the original plan had been to have an untreated Cedar of Lebanon lining to try to keep carpet moths away. After doing some experimentation, we decided that the cedar looked really nice with oil applied, so decided to oil it despite the risk of inducing an aroma (albeit a nice one) into the yarn of the hand warmers and reducing the effectiveness of the moth-protection.

The sides of the box are made from American Black Walnut (ABW); the lid and the splines are maple; the lining is Cedar of Lebanon and the detail insert in the lid is (we believe) Greenheart.

The box was mostly made using hand tools, although I used a router to cut the groove for the Greenheart insert in the lid.

This photo shows a close-up of the splined mitres. These were cut in the same way as described in the page for my first box. I also used the same technique to separate the lid from the body of the box.

This photo shows the oiled Cedar of Lebanon lining. The box was treated with the same Tung Oil, White Spirit & Varnish mix used on my side table as it is a very hard wearing and easy to apply finish.

On my first box I'd made sure that the mitred corners were cut in such a way that the grain was continuous all the way round the outside of the box. However, I didn't worry about achieving the same for the lining. As the grain of the cedar is so distinctive, I thought it would be better to put that same level of attention to detail into this box and the lining's grain continues all the way round the four inside corners. You can see this more clearly if you click on the above pictures for a clearer view.

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