bloodwood gift box

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Don't tell my wife, this is her Christmas present.

Sort of a bandsaw box, but instead of drawers that slide out, the trays pivot on two axles made from 1/8" brass rod. It's small, it would fit inside a 4" diameter circle. I used some narrow 4/4 bloodwood stock. I was originally planning to template route the trays, but the small size confounded me. I took everything to its final shape by hand, so there's a good deal of imprecision. The lids are solid, and I put the shape into them with a microplane and card scraper. The base is a bookmatched glueup of a resawn piece of my thin bloodwood stock. The grain pattern was a sort of happy discovery--the grain was mostly straight as an arrow in my stock.


This shows the completed box with the contoured lids. I was sick of making rectangles, but I haven't got a lathe to make round things, so this is what I came up with. It's sort of inspired by a piece I saw in the Klockit catalog. But I made my own templates and worked out the design myself to take advantage of my narrow stock.


My version allows both halves of the lid to open. Through [s]dumb luck[/s] inspired design, the halves do not interfere with each other, so each tray is individually accessible.


Opening this up reveals more trays beneath...



Yet more trays...

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And at the bottom there's a solid base piece about 3/8" thick that maintains the spacing between the axles. Like I said, I was stunned to get some heart shaped grain figure in an otherwise straight-grained board.

Bloodwood takes a finish superbly. Using synthetic steel wool I was able to get a **** of a lustre on the wood with no product applied. I put on several coats of Tru-Oil to get to the final finish shown. In my lacquer spray tests, the surface didn't quite gloss this much so I stuck with what I had used previously.

Bottoms of the trays were resawn off like a bandsaw box, and they are about 1/16" thick, which gave me some tearout issues when I cut them to shape. Backer board while doing the final shape would have helped.


One more close up to show the grain in the bloodwood. I didn't attempt to fill grain.

I really enjoy working with bloodwood. I did not run into any sensitivity problems, and the smell of the stuff is wonderful, sort of like suntan lotion or coconut cream.

[Ken Massingale]

That's a real nice piece of craftsmanship, Rob. I'm sure that will make the missus very happy, which makes you happy.
What is the finish, it looks great.
Ken

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Ken, thank you, it's Birchwood-Casey Tru-Oil, which I learned about from Tundra Man and have been a fan of since. The only thing not to like about it is the price.

[TheRic]

Looks BEAUTIFUL!!!! I can not imagine her not liking it.

[Popeye]

BEAUTIFUL . Pat

[John Hunter]

Very nice.

[niki]

Mama miya, that's a present from the HEART
Beautifully made

niki

[Mrs. Wallnut]

Your wife will love that. Absolutely BEAUTIFUL work.

[GeekMom]

Your wife will love this! What a beautiful gift!

[Turaj]

WOW! That is just beautiful!! Great work!

[mater]

That is beautiful work.

[WoodButcher26]

That's really cool looking, I love the design. Great work!

[crokett]

That is beautiful work. I was looking at the pictures before reading the writeup and thinking you'd planned it well to cut it just right so the drawers didn't interfere with each other. Personally, I wouldn't have known it was 'dumb luck' without you telling me.

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On the drawer interference, I did test it out at full scale with my MDF templates. the trays did interfere, but only slightly, so that when you opened the left-hand sidea little, you could then open the right. It was a close thing, so I decided not to recalculate my axle positions. Then in the final shaping, I wound up decreasing the size of everything from the template somewhat in the process of fine-tuning the fit. In the process I cured my slight interference.

Thanks everyone for looking. I know based on the feedback from the ladies that I'm on the right track gift-wise. I am attempting a little subterfuge; I packed the piece up in a camera box that's loaded down heavily with MDF scrap, so as to give a false impression of the size and weight of the gift.