Tea Box – Build

Continuing on from last weeks post about the design of a tea box, here we have the actual fabrication. I’m going to try and pack everything into this one post, so I may omit certain details, but feel free to comment or ask questions if there’s anything that remains unclear.

The wood for the box is keyaki throughout. The client ordered 1 box, but hinted at the fact that he might like a second some day, so I milled enough stock for two boxes out of one board of keyaki. I rough milled the stock, leaving all parts plenty fat, several weeks in advance. I wanted to gradually bring things down to final thickness, with several sessions of jointing/planing, with plenty of time to settle and move between sessions, before reaching the final desired thickness. Milling stock that way usually leads to flat stable material, but it’s not a fool proof method. In this case most of the stock came out beautifully flat, particularly the quartersawn parts that I used for the inner trays, but the flat sawn stock that I used for the box sides and top panels unfortunately continued to move a bit.

Here’s my little stack of lumber, stacked and stickered.

Once I did final mill the stock one of the first things I did was to glue up the bottoms of the inner trays, which were made up of 4 rips of nice quartersawn material. I planned to glue these panels directly onto the bottom of the trays, so I wanted quartersawn stock to reduce movement as much as possible.

I should also mention that for this box, I used liquid hide glue for the first time in a very long time. Last time I used hide glue was in lutherie school almost 20 years ago, but I’ve been thinking about using hide glue for a while as an alternative to the regular Titebond II and III that I usually use. My main reason for switching to hide glue has been in the interest of future repairability (mainly for my furniture work), and after giving it a try on this project I have to say I’m really digging it. The possibility of repairability is great, but I’m also in love with the fact that I can easily clean up squeeze out AFTER the glue has dried in the event that I miss a spot. On a few occasions I have struggled with PVA glues, particularly Titebond III, which I find tricky to clean up. In my experience it tends to soak into the wood, such that if you don’t wipe it up immediately, it can leave a film or stain in the wood. So not having to worry about that with hide glue is a blessing. Also the main reason I usually reach for Titebond III is to give myself a bit more working time, but liquid hide glue wins in that area as well, with a really generous open time before the glue starts to set and grab.

Below you can see one of the box sides. You can see I milled a groove for housing the bottom panel, as well as a rabbet for locating the lid. From there I cut the miters using the sliding table saw. The final task before gluing up the box was to hand plane the inside of each part. I’ve experimented with a few different planing stops for miters in the past, and this time I gave a simple screw a try and it worked out great. It’s far enough below the surface that there was no risk of hitting it with my plane, and it did a fantastic job of holding the piece without risking any damage to the thin edges of the miter.

Here’s a look at the fit of the bottom panel with the sides of the box before gluing.

And here is the box glue-up. Lately when I’ve been doing mitered glue-ups I’ve been making clamping cauls like these. Essentially the cauls are thin sheets of mdf with mitered blocks glued to the ends to more effectively direct the clamping pressure.

I find I have way more control when using cauls like these. It’s pretty simple to dial in the pressure on each corner ensuring that the joints close up tight, but you can also pretty easily shift and move things if a corner gets out of alignment.

Here is the layout for the box joints on the sides of the inset trays.

And here are the same joints after cutting and fitting. I cut these joints on the sliding table saw follow by a little bit of chisel work to clear out the waste.

The next task on the list was to cut and fit the tray dividers. I decided to put one of my ha-ganna (kumiko planes) to use for this task. I like dividers that meet with a miter, versus being let it with a simple dado cut. To my eye mitered dividers look much cleaner. So to make use of the ha-ganna, I setup a simple jig to guide the plane while cutting across the grain of the tray parts. Below you can see the jig as well as a few test pieces I used to dial in the depth of cut.

Here are the long sides for the two trays, with the locations for the dividers laid out.

Using the jig was as simple as lining up my layout lines with the v-cut in the jig.

With one pull of the plane the cut was made. This process was super simple, clean, and fast. Definitely an occasion where hand tools shine.

One of the great things about using ha-ganna for this task, was that I was able to make a shallower cut using a 30 degree ha-ganna that produced a 120 degree v-cut in the stock. A shallower cut means not having to take as much meat out of the stock, and it also makes it possible to cut a v-notch on both sides of the stock as you can see in a few of the pieces below.

I cut the mitered ends on the tablesaw. Below you can see the overall arrangement as I dry fit the pieces.

Here’s phase one of the tray glue-ups, using liquid hide glue once again.

Once all the dividers were glued, the last step for the trays was to glue on the quartersawn keyaki bottom panels.

Here’s another area where the longer open time and ease of cleanup of hide glue really shined. I could take my time with this glue-up, ensuring things came together nicely, and then work on cleaning up the glue with no worries about staining or having to deal with glue drying before I had a chance to hit it with a rag.

The final task for this box was the lid. The following drawing shows a cross-section view of the box and lid details, which I discussed in some detail in last weeks post.

I started with the frame pieces, and cut a groove for the top panel using a slot cutter in the router table.

After the slot was cut I continued on at the router table and cut the rabbet on the bottom side of each frame piece. And from there I could cut the miters at the table saw. The thin strip of walnut that is glued on to the bottom edge of these pieces was glued on before all the joinery work.

The top panels for the lids were troublesome pieces. Despite my attempts to mill these pieces gradually over a few weeks, they still kept moving a bit after I had reach the final thickness. So taking a hint from Chris Hall, I decided to make some relief cuts on the underside of these panels with the hope that I could effectively weaken them such that they would stay flat in their respective frames. For the relief cuts I used a skinny little spiral router bit (2mm diameter) and routed about 6 mm deep.

For the most part these relief cuts worked out, and overall the panels became much more pliable. I probably could have had these cuts flow all the way through, rather than stopping them short like I did here, and the panels would have become even more flexible. But I thought it would look nice if the relief cuts stopped short of the frames, though you will only see that detail when you open the lid and look underneath.

The final joinery for the panels involved cutting a set of tongues to mate with the previously cut groove in the frame pieces.

Here’s a shot of the frame and panel fit together.

After gluing up the lid frames, one of the final details to complete was cutting and gluing in a set of walnut keys to reinforce the miter joints. I used the router table and 1.5 mm slot cutter for these cuts. One the glue was dry and the keys trimmed flush I spent some time hand planing the the outside of the boxes. I also used a plane to fine tune the fit of the trays.

And here’s the final product, finished with a coat of liquid glass.

The color of the keyaki is pretty light at the moment, but it should darken over time which will create a milder contrast with the walnut accents. One thing I would like to do slightly differently next time is to adze the raised panel of the lid. The clean look of the flat hand planed panel is nice, but I think a hewn texture would really add a nice level of contrast, and on a wood like this flat sawn keyaki, a scalloped, hewn texture can really look beautiful. Next time perhaps.

Well that wraps up this project. Thanks for following along.