Woodworker's Journal 1993-17-2, страница 13

Woodworking Basics

I can ihink of few workshop projects as satisfying as making wooden boxes. Although I've been building boxes for years, I still can't quite put tny finger on the attraction. When I'm making a little jewelry box. I think it's the challenge of precise joinery on a small scale. But then 1 make a rough-and-ready tool box or toy chest, anil I get a charge out of that, too. Maybe the appeal resides in the small mystery that .seems to hover around any box—who can resist the urge to open the thing and see what's inside?

Whatever the attraction, boxes are a lot of fun to make. Although there are a great many things to consider when making a box—purpose, size, material, embellishment—two practical considerations stand out: How are you going to join the corners, and what should you do about the lid? Between them, the treatment of comers and lids establishes much of a box's character and the ease or difficulty of constructing it. What follows is a sort of corner-joint and box-lid sampler, covering options I've tried over the years, and what I've learned about them. I'll start with corner joints.

Low-tech Corners

The simplest box corners are the butt joint and its slightly more sophisticated

March/April 1993

cousin, the rabbet joint (Fig. I). Glued and pinned with nails or screws, these are serviceable joints for making boxes

fast. A rabbeted corner is easier to position during assembly and the shoulder provides some resistance to racking

forces (pressure applied diagonally across the box). Even when stuck together only with glue, small rabbeted boxes can he surprisingly durable, despite the inherent weakness of the end-grain gluing surfaces. If you don't want to devote effort to joinery, and the primary attraction of the small box is a painled or carved surface, you might consider rabbeted corners. Larger butt-jointed or rabbeted boxes, however, won't withstand much knocking about unless their corners are strengthened with angle brackets, metal straps or some other mechanical reinforcement.

Rabbet-and-Dado

This joint isn't a great deal more difficult to produce than a simple rabbet (Fig. 2>. but it is much stronger. You can make the joint by hand (with a plow plane) or with a shaper, a router, a radial-arm saw or a table saw. 1 usually use the table saw', cutting the dadoes first, then rabbeting the mating pieces to make snug-fitting tongues. A few clamps pull the joints tight: if the joints fit well, glue alone is enough to make durable, long-lasting corners that stand up well to racking stresses.

Viewed from the ends of the box, this joint is indistinguishable from a butt joint. Because it shows so much end

Please circle No. 8 on the Reader Sen il e Card 13

BUILDING BOXES

Options aplenty for this favorite subject

by Roger Holmes