These jewelry or “Bandsaw Boxes” started their life out as the old original decking planks from my 60’s era home on the peninsula.
During my DIY house restoration when it came time to pretty up the front of the house. I replaced the decking on my little front entry porch,
which left me with a nice lot of old hardwood to get creative with.
The old hardwood that came up during the DIY decking replacement, although looking worn and faded at the time, brightened up once the exposed layers were removed by the woodworking machines.
Once cleaned up, I trimmed them down into short lengths cutting away the damaged parts and existing nail holes.
That left a lot of short lengths ready to be glued and turned into a big block of hardwood.
With this roughly 300mm x 300mm x 85mm lump of striped hardwood all cleaned up, I could get to the design. Wanting these to be unique I chose the first letter of each niece’s name as the shape for the end product, “N” and “E”. These were great shapes as they could each house 2 drawers for consistency yet still be unique.
I spent a bit of time looking through fonts on the computer to see if there was already a suitable shape for the letters out there.
But I had no luck finding one that met the criteria or vision I had in my head of what they would look like.
The “N” had the toughest requirements as it needed to have some substance under the bottom drawer for the drawer to sit on, and still
be quite bold and solid.
So back to old-fashioned pencil and paper it was to design my own font suitable to be turned into jewelry boxes.
With the designs chosen it was time to cut out the main shapes and start turning the drawers from solid chunks of off cuts into usable drawers. Balancing between allowing maximum storage capacity while maintaining the necessary strength to withstand day to day life.
Now it’s just a matter of lots of cutting, gluing and sanding before thinking about the finishing touches.
For the drawer handles I decided to make from them the same hardwood material, so I glued a few more off cuts together to gain a contrasting stripe before heading to the machines to shape the blank into 4 handles.
Before the final sanding and finishing I thought about how these boxes might be used in a day-to-day scenario and decided that they
would need a way to stop the drawers from falling out the back.
Right from the start I knew I was going to deviate from the traditional bandsaw box method of giving the piece a solid back.
I did this because I wanted the shape of the capital letters to really stand out.
This meant I needed a new way of stopping the drawers from sliding completely past flush and falling out the back side. I saw a pile of small rare earth magnets on my window sill from a previous project and immediately had my answer. 8 precise small holes drilled and a bit more glue later the drawers were sliding and “clicking” into place when the magnets lined up. Problem solved!
Now just to make sure everything is sanded and smooth before applying the bees wax finish.
