Weighted Base Box Build Process

3/10/2021

It's too wet to work on my Chunky Planter, so I thought I'd do a little more on the box. I started by unclamping the box so I could inspect the splines; so far they all look good.

I used a flush-cut saw to cut off the excess pieces:

All done, does anyone need any miniature V-blocks?!!!

This is what one side looked like after cutting off the spline excess; you can see some glue squeeze out visible in places and some white something-or-other (maple dust maybe?):

I didn't fancy sanding the sides (partly because I don't like sanding but mainly because I was worried about padauk dust colouring the maple), so I used a thin card scraper to clean up the faces of the box:

I then rubbed the top and bottom faces on a sheet of 240 grit sandpaper:

Two of the mitres (on the right of this photo) were ever so slightly gappy; it looks worse on this photo than it did in reality, but I've generally managed to get mitres spot on, so I was a bit disappointed with this. I suspect it would have been good to add some additional clamping as well as the masking tape; I probably didn't pull the masking tape tight enough:

I'll make those two mitres sit at the back of the box (where the hinges are), so they're not too obvious. Nevertheless, I thought I'd try cleaning them up a bit by using a very thin saw I have to cut a shallow kerf (using a combination square as a reference to make sure the cut is at 45°):

I then shoved some glue in the hole and covered it in the sawdust that came from sanding the top and bottom faces.

Once that's had plenty of time to dry I'll sand it and see what it looks like.

While the glue's drying I thought I'd have another go at a hinge test fit. I was disappointed first time round that, despite carefully measuring the thickness of the hinge, the test piece "box" didn't close properly. As a test I decided to slot the nails into the holes and measure it again:

It's clear that the nail heads are stopping the hinge from closing; the side view shows that the hinge ends up at an angle, which is far from ideal:

After pondering for a bit, I concluded the simplest solution would be to use the 240 grit sandpaper I already had on my bench to reduce the height of the brass nail heads a bit; I'd then need to polish the brass to get them looking good, which would be a bit of a chore, but there's only 8 nails, so it probably wouldn't take that long.

However, it turns out they aren't brass, just plated steel:

Onto plan C (whatever that may be)...

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