Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 22nd September 2024
Well, today is the last full day in Brittany. Tomorrow morning we'll be packing everything into the car and making our way north, ready for an early morning ferry from Normandy on Tuesday morning. Since the last instalment, I've made one more simple box (another tea caddy, this time from cherry). I didn't take any in-progress photos as the box is much the same as the previous tea caddy in construction (except that I mitred the bottom dovetails to make ploughing the grooves a bit easier).
The one in-progress photo I did take was on a slightly overcast day when I found an unusual but quite effective way of lighting the workpiece, by clamping the bracket for the light to the back of the chest under the vice:
Anyway, the tea caddy started off as the right-hand end of these two planks of cherry...
... which were turned into most of these bits:
You might notice that the box base looks a bit different. I didn't fancy the idea of planing 9–10 mm thick cherry down to 3–4 mm for a base and I had a bit of 3 mm thick oak of about the right size, so I decided it would be simpler to just use that. No-one will see it once the box is full of tea!
The finished box:
As this is the end of this trip to Brittany, in which I've done a lot more woodwork than I would normally expect as a result of Carolyn needing time to rest and recover as her broken femur heals, I thought it would be a good time to gather all the boxes together and take a couple of photos:
When I get back to England, I'll turn and fit the knobs for the drawer box and then apply some finish (probably Mike's Magic Mix for the oak box and the drawer box and mineral oil for the tea caddies).
Page 142 of 144
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