Building a Box with Barrel Sides: Part 2

This is part two of our barrel sided box. This is the project. If you've not seen part one, which is going to get you to where we are right now, go back and check that then come back and you'll be all caught up. Caught up is here's a maple box that came out of the clamps. The glue is dry. It's ready for its bottom. One of the things you might have to do is level the parts just a little bit in case they're uneven. We want the bottom and the top to go on and sit on there nice and flat. This is a good way to do that on a nice flat surface, like your work bench or a table saw, clamp a piece of sandpaper down and just sand those surfaces until everything levels out. Otherwise it's not going to seat. Now we're ready for a bottom. And one of the things you may notice is the bottom is a good length, just a little short on the sides, that doesn't bother me because of the way we're going to barrel those sides in. This was a piece I already had from another project. It's going to work just fine for this. Same issue we had before, we'd like to not have a lot of squeeze out on the inside of the box, so I'm going to again, go to that extra thick glue to help prevent that from squeezing. Our maple box doesn't have any stripes, it's a stripeless box Making sure my ends are even, I'm centered left to right. That glue's got to dry. That gets us to this point. Walnut box with stripes. The bottom is on, the glue is dry, we're ready for the next step. The next step is layout. Now I can't make this too formulaic for you because it's going to depend on just how thick your sides are as far as what kind of curve we can introduce to this. So here's how you can figure this out. What I'm going to do is use a square and I want to strike a line off of this inside face. So I know where that surface is on the outside of my box. Now what's critical about this is that when we introduce our curve, we can't come to this point because we'll cut through, we'll blow into the inside of the box. So on your layout, do that same thing, make a line. And then from there, come off of it, a quarter inch, which in this case, because of my rabbits, the end of that piece is a quarter inch in. What we want to do then is get a curve that goes from there to the center to the inside of the rabbit down here, I'll mark that out. And then we'll give ourselves a center mark. Now there's a couple of ways you can do this. I found that this disc, which is about 11 inches in diameter, was almost perfect for my particular material. And again, this material is over three quarter. I started with full four quarter. So it's really, my material's about 7/8 of an inch. Alternatively, you can use what's called a flexible curve, like this, hit the point, hit the center point, hit the rabbit, trace. Now where we're going with this is we're going to stand this up just like this on the bandsaw and make that cut. So we need the same layout here. And then we need the same layout here and here. I'm going to go ahead with all my layouts and we're going to head for the bandsaw. Before I make cuts, have a look at the layout here, there's my curve and laid out away from our inside edge so that we don't cut in, need that on both sides. Same thing on our end. There's our barrel shape. What's going to happen is we're going to do these cuts on the bandsaw just like this. I'm using a quarter inch, four tooth per inch blade. You're going to have to do some sanding after this, there's no way around it. If you go with too fine a tooth blade with this much wood it's not going to want to make the cut. As you do this, just slow and steady. Let the saw do the work so that the blade isn't flexing as you swing through the curve. Once this side is done, I have to masking tape the parts back on. So then we can lay it this way to cut that side out. So you're going to see all of this happen twice. Now, while I'm taping parts back on, let's talk about some dimensional stuff. If the capacity of your saw is such that you can't do an eight inch box, well just scale everything down and bring that dimension down to a point where it will fit under the upper guide on your saw. Now I'm going to be able to see my lines through that masking tape. So that set up is just fine. Be sure you put the right sides back on the right sides because you free handed that, did that cut freehand, they probably aren't perfectly the same from one side to the other. All right, second verse, same as the first, this side will cut a little bit easier because we're going through less material. We can bring our upper guide down. Ready, set, go. All right. Let's do a reveal. Here we are with our barrel sided box, got some bandsaw marks on there, that's going to take some sanding. That's pretty cool. Now, until we get to this step, we can't make the top because this final dimension here is what's going to indicate the top size to us. So take outside to outside, add a half inch total, outside to outside, plus a half inch. In other words, we're going to have a quarter inch overhang of our lid on all four sides. I'm going to get my lid ready and we're going to come back to the bandsaw, to dome the lid. Got my lid ready for the next step here, which means it's a quarter inch per side, larger than the base of the box. Big picture what's going to happen is we're going to do this cut first and then you would go and rabbit the bottom, so it sits inside the base of the box. I've laid out a curve by measuring up 3/8 of an inch on each end, find the center and then draw what's called a fair curve, a flowing curve, through those points on a side and on an end. Then we're back to the bandsaw. That's what we need to do. But I would find that really scary. In this case that board is so small, there's very little to hold onto. This worked for our box, doesn't work for an individual board. So we're going to create a handle on this thing to make everything easier and safer by temporarily fastening two pieces like this. It's critical that this end, that we're about to put on here, is cut square. I'm going to use thick CA, cyanoacrylate, glue. Thick because we've got end grain here, I want to make sure that if we went with a thinner bodied glue it might just soak in too much, soak in too much, and we wouldn't get enough of a bond. Now the beauty of CA glue is that this is temporary because as soon as we're done with this step, we're going to be able to pop that piece right off. And it doesn't mean that the glue doesn't have good strength. It does, but you'll see when we get to that step, that just because our handle is so long, it's going to be easy to on the end there, we've got a lot of leverage. And we'll be able to crack it loose of our target piece. So I use glue, I use accelerator. We'll give this just a few seconds to dry and then we'll be ready to go to the bandsaw. All right, and then this step is going to be very much the same as what we did before. I'm going to make the cut, save the pieces, masking tape them back on because I need them in order to see this pencil line. Now, that lets us pop that loose. We're going to glue it this way, grab my piece that's got the line on it and we'll be able to put this back together to make the next cut. Now we're working with hardwood here, with walnut, and you saw what it took to get that apart. But at the same time, in our hardwood, it didn't peel any fibers out of the bottom there, which is great. We will sand that glue residue off before finishing, but it didn't tear the wood up or anything bad. All right. Get our handle off and have a look at our dome. Here's where you're at to finish everything up, sanding on here so that we take off the bandsaw marks, and we kind of fare this curve together. So look at what we've got there. That's exactly how this one started with those facets. So some sanding will blend everything together. Now to get this to nest on top of this, we need a little rabbit cut on the bottom. So that rabbit can be done on the table saw or on the router table, table saw with the dado head, router table with the straight bit. So set that up so that we rabbit those shoulders on each side until that'll drop in there, little hand sanding to finish everything off and you'll be ready for finish. So barrel sided project or barrel sided box is a, I think a pretty cool project. It looks more complex than it is. Once you know the steps. Part of the secret here was that thick glue. So we didn't have squeeze out on our inside corners, the CA glue so that we could create that temporary handle. I think it all worked out really well.