My wife’s pandemic hobby has been to renew her passion for drawing. She hadn’t drawn seriously since she was a kid so we had no supplies. Soon she had lots of supplies but nowhere to keep them, so I decided to make her something.
This is intended to be a well-used utility box so I intentionally left it a bit rough. The interior is only lightly sanded and some glue joints are visible. The idea here being to discourage the tendency with well-finished boxes to worry about scuffs and scratches. I did sand the outside well, down to 800 grit, then applied a simple paste wax finish.
The box design was from one of the parametric box calculator web sites. (Sorry, I forget which one.) You plug in length, width, height and some detail of the tab size for the joints. There are a total of 4 open-top boxes here:
The bottom
The liner and divider in the bottom
The tray
The lid
I also learned enough Inkscape to design the center divider for the top tray with a cut-out handle.
Last year I lined our master bedroom closet in cedar and had some leftover planks. These are 1/4" thick tongue-and-groove strips sold in 15 sq ft packs. The box width and height is just small enough to fit the cut outline into one of those strips.
The look of the box is far better then the small amount of work I put into finishing it deserves. When I make pens or bowls on the lathe the finishing is the bulk of the work and in this case it was the least part of the project but the result is beautiful.
Well, yes but I find bananas to be a very imprecise metric. Just grabbing a random sample size of one the length varies by 100% ~ 200% or more.
I was about to embark on measuring all of the bananas we have on hand, then taking the average of them as the metric but decided on something a bit more precise. How’s this?
This is it. If the latch isn’t closed, picking up by a handle would dump the contents. Requiring a grip on the box makes this less likely. Also, I saved my favorite plank for the top since it’s the biggest visible surface and any handle I could make or find would only diminish that.
Looks great, any plans on adding a handle eventually, or do you think this will be its final form?