Another project commissioned by my dad for my mum. Here's the problem:
A 20 year old shoe box with their shoe cleaning kit in. It is falling apart. So will be replaced with a similar sized box in oak.
We start with a piece of sawn lumber from the woodyard.
I don't much care for the aesthetics of modern saws, but they get the job done, in this case cutting a 15″ length out of the board. I figured I could get four thin boards out of just this one piece, saving a lot of wood. This tree must have been growing for at least 50 years, probably twice that. It should be treated with a certain reverence, and in my shed, will be.
I was careful to leave enough length at the waste end to turn a bowl out of, there's a lovely knot there to work around.
My cutting plan, to get a total of 6 pieces out of four thicknesses. Next step, plane a flat face on one side. This takes time, but has to be dead on, as it is the reference surface for all other faces. My trusty Record 5 1/2 plane is just the job. The last 10 strokes took as long as the first 100.
Next, the reference edge, again dead straight and square.
Then I flattened and cleaned up the second side, co-planar with the reference side, marked off the first slice, and set up the bandsaw, making sure the blade is square to the table.
The first slice came off easily enough, though this is at the very limit of what this little bandsaw can do.
Then I planed the top surface clean and flat, and repeated the process twice more. I got my four boards, plus an extra thin one. Of course the board started to cup as the slices came off, so I had to dress the face side before the last pass to get it to thickness.
So, next up, I need to clean and flatten the other face of each of these, mark out my cutting list, cut it all out, lay out the joints, select and cut the bottom of the box (probably plywood, as this will live between the back door and the boiler, so will move like mad), put it all together, and finish!