Inspiration and ideation:
For this bandsaw box project I wanted to re-create something from one of my favorite games Minecraft. I thought it would be fun to make a box based on one of the wooden blocks. I chose the crafting table because it has rather complicated pattern which I thought would look nice recreating with different types of wood.
I decided to use maple for the main body of the block, alternating with plywood boards for the darker stripes around the perimeter, and finally walnut for the dark vertical stripes. Rather than a regular drawer, I envisioned this box to be opened from the top, which means a different drawer design altogether (which I will discuss later).
The fabrication process:
I started by planing the maple and the walnut using the machine (which made a big mess) as well as by hand, I was curious to try out the method some of us did with their walnut which they glued them up and planed them by the machine, but later I found out it wasn’t necessary because I only needed thin strips of the wood.
I glued the different woods together and made sure they are aligned as best as I could at least on one side so as to minimize later cutting and sanding.
then I cut down the block to size, cut out the grooves along the sides using the router, and then inserted the walnut stripes.
one technical highlight here is that I used chisels and a hammer to flatten out the sides of the grooves (created by the inevitable errors of the router) so that the stripe fits easily into the groove.
then I did the regular procedure of cutting the core out of the block and creating a tray out of it, but when I was cutting the bottom the band saw blade curved and cut into the wall so I had to start from the other side.
unfortunately I didn’t have a photo documentation of what happened then but basically it did something like this: the blade curved and at a large margin. that mainly was because of the fence I was using, because I was cutting off such a great amount of wood, the blade (although I was using the half-inch wide one) was under so much pressure that it wants to bend to either side, in which case you are better off using your hand to adjust the direction of the wood (sometimes rotating as far as 45 degrees) to account for the bending of the saw blade.
When cutting the drawer I accidentally cut the bottom at a slight angle and it was not flat at all so I had to sand the middle section short a bit and replace the bottom with a piece of plywood that I know was flat but this ended up making the drawer a little too short for the shell, btu it was not a huge problem.
what was a huge problem though was I could have done some more planning and insert the walnut stripes after I had glued the walls and the bottom back together (even cutting the groove before that) so that the cutting won’t show as much on the outside (especially when the band saw went wrong). I will have to fill them in with fillers later.
Future plan:
in progress, laser-cut pieces almost ready to be added onto the box
