Fundamentals of Hand Tools Session 6: Make the Lid and Apply Finish

Well, now it's time to go and turn our attention to the lid of the box. This is just a short blank that I've milled to the same dimension as the other pieces of the box just slightly over one half inch. And we're gonna smooth it up with our plane. And it really doesn't matter, unlike the other pieces exactly how thick this is. So I'm not gonna be fussy about using blocks or anything like that, to get an exact thickness. Really what I'm after is to make this thing look as good as it possibly can. You know, if I rub a piece of chalk over this, I can see instantly all the high on those spots and you'd be amazed at how slightly uneven a surface is when it comes out of a planer or a jointer. But instead, we're gonna use a hand plank 'cause that, is just makes everything perfectly level. So I'm gonna set it back in my jig again, again, to reiterate the importance of the jig is that it easily enables you to hold a short piece that's tough to hold on a bench without it. And also provides a nice level of surface, so the piece doesn't rock or bend underneath you. So before we get in planing though, I gotta ask myself, well, which direction does the grain go on this piece? If I go the wrong direction, I'm gonna get all kinds of nasty tear out. So can I tell by looking at the surface of the board? Well, most people think you can but the true answer is that you really can't. And let me explain that. If you look at the surface of this board, you'll see all these cathedral lines formed by the growth rings. Now I want you to think of those lines as contour lines on a topographic map. Only there's no numbers indicating elevation at all. So let's think of that map, take the numbers off and just look at a small segment of it as we are here. So looking at these lines, you know there's a hill here, or a valley, which is it? Are these lines going down into a valley or are they going up to a hill? At first glance, you're just really can't tell. The way to read grain direction, like on a board like this, isn't just assume that these lines are pointing in the direction you should plane. What you gotta do instead is to look at the adjacent side. This tells the real story. If we look here can see the growth rings are all rising this direction, going uphill like that. So if you can imagine this is kind of the hair on a dog or a cat, when you pet the cat, pet the dog you don't wanna go the wrong way. You wanna smooth it this direction, always going uphill with the grain. So whenever you're gonna plane a surface, take a look at it, but choose your grain direction, by looking at the adjacent side, not the top side. Now this is a pretty short board. So fortunately, usually when you're planing a board like this, which is why it's a great project to start out on, this jewelry box because you're only dealing with short stuff. On a longer board, the grain can easily change direction around a nod or something like that. And that presents other difficulties of making a, planing a board like that and getting it smooth, but for a short board like this, grain direction usually just goes in one direction. This is a wonderful way to learn how to handle a plane and to make a wood surface that looks terrific. So, let's get this wedged into our jig here again. Tighten these up, give it a little wiggle, tighten these up again, and we're good to go. So back to our smooth plane, lubricating the sole a little bit with our piece of paraffin wax. And starting at one side, skewing the plane a little bit. Start going down the length here. Now, you remember when I was planing the top of the box? I took a pencil out and kinda marked the thing, the joints. So I could tell where I had planed and where I hadn't planed. Well, I'll tell you what? It's a good idea to do the same thing on any large surface you're planing like this. Just make these marks all the way across here. In fact, this is a good thing to do, even when you're just using machinery, a jointer or a planer, because this is, your sure way of knowing when a surface has been touched by the knives and when it hasn't. And when you're starting out with wood that's already looks pretty smooth, like a lot of lumber comes these days, then this marking method really indicates where you've been. So, let's start it again here. What we're gonna see here is that plane, is kinda the low areas left by the machine I passed this through. Can you still see the marks right here? That indicates that that surface is just a hair lower, and I'm talking about the thickness of this plane shaving which is about, 0.2007 inch thick that's, piece of paper is about three thousands. So those marks told me, where I planed and where I didn't plane. And what I'd also like you to take a look at is that the color of the wood changed when I planed. And that's indicates the reason for planing, is that you're cleanly cutting the cells, they're reflecting light better because they're cleanly cut than when they're cut by machine knives or sandpaper or something like that. So the whole wood will just, the whole piece will look better, after it's been planed and slightly sanded. So, let's go over this whole thing again. This piece, planes like a dream. There we go. Nice wide shavings all the way across. So are we done? Well, no, not really. If your plane was perfectly sharp and perfectly set up, and you didn't mind the tale tale sign of some plane marks in the finished piece, you could say, "Okay, game over." But, in reality, as you plane wood, your blade develops these teeny little nicks in it and they leave teeny little ridges left behind here. And they would look pretty ugly under a finish. So when I'm done planing, I always take my 220 grit sandpaper and a block. And go over the whole surface to eliminate those teeny little ridges. And just like we were planing around the rim of the top, the other reason for sanding is to detect whether there is any tear out anywhere that you can't see from above here. But as you remember looking at that tear out, when you start sanding something, the sanding dust, fills in the little areas. And now I can also see, as I'm sanding teeny little traces left by the edge of the plane blade. That means it's just a little low in some places because the plane blade is straight across in the center. And then I've sharpened it to have little curves on the end. And that prevents you from getting a huge step kind of cut which is the bane of most people trying to learn how to use a plane, is getting that blade perfectly level. So those little curves leave a little low area and sanding reveals them. Sanding also tells you how minor they are. I mean, this is 220 grit paper, and I've just gone from a surface that looked okay, pretty good to one that is perfectly flat, perfectly smooth. I don't see any tear out here. But if there were, some area around here that showed some white dust, I would tackle it with my card scraper. This time I'm going to hold it kinda the normal way which is to put my thumbs in the middle right in the center, bend it like this into an arc. And what that does is to stiffen the tool. So it doesn't chatter when I push it. It also has the effect of turning it into kind of a bow like this. Let's see if we can see that. I'm gonna put, hold my thumbs in the center and pull away like this. And you can see now that only the center of the blade is touching the wood not the corners of the card scraper. So, and I can move my thumbs from side to side to favor this section or this section. And so I don't put all the ware dwell in a blade, just in the middle of this thing. So again, if I saw some tear out here, just take this and lightly plane like this, scrape like that. And what I'm after are shavings, not just dust. Really thin little shavings. And then after scraping, I would also do some more sanding because just like a plane blade, a scraper like this will develop little nicks in its edge and leave those teeny little ridges. Fortunately, they're not valleys like course sandpaper leaves. But ridges that are easy to sand out. Little bit of sanding, and I'm all set. If this were a larger board, and I needed to, probably, anticipate this when I was doing it, that actually has the effect of putting a teeny little valley in here. 'Cause I've just removed a little bit of wood in one area. And just with some light scraping, it really doesn't matter. You'll never see that. But if you were doing a large surface, or you had some deep tear out, you'd wanna use a different kind of scraper that has a sole on it, a number 80 scraper but that's a whole nother story. So anyway, after planing the top surface of the board, I wanna flip it over do the same thing to the bottom surface. And then we're gonna move on to making the lip all the way around here. And while I could do that by hand, it's gonna be a heck of a lot easier to use a router table. So that's why this is a mostly unplugged project routing next. Well, now we're gonna move back to they're working on machines. That's okay, in my shop, that's the way it is. I go back from machines to hand tools back and forth depending on what's the most efficient and sometimes just what's the most fun way to make something. But in this case, what we wanna do, is to make this rabbet all the way around the inner surface of the lid. And the fit of the lid to the box is kinda fussy. So this is gonna take a number of adjustments to the fence on our router table to get it right but I'll walk you through how you do that. But just to show you where we're going, what we want is to have the lid fit in here with just a little bit aloof looseness, a 32nd of an inch would be more than enough. So we talk, it gives you an idea what the tolerances are that we're talking about. And then we want that looseness for two reasons. One is we want to be sure, dead sure that somebody doesn't have to worry about which way the lid goes when they take the lid on/off the box it's gotta fit both directions. And secondly, you don't want them to have to push the lid into place if you go make the lid fit too tight. And I know at least from my own case, as a cabinet maker, it's really easy to go overboard on making things too tight. The question is, how loose do you make them? You don't want it totally sloppy, but we're gonna be able to get there. Now I'm using the router table to make this rabbet all the way around here. But I could probably also use a dado set in the table saw but the reason I'm not is that, well, first of all, my dado set has scoring blades on the inside and outside of the outer blades have these little tips on them that leave slightly deeper grooves in whatever you're cutting, which helps prevent tear out of save the near fibers or something like that. And that would leave little grooves in the surface here that are a real pain in the neck to get out. Whereas, a router, a knife like this will just make a smoother surface, not perfectly smooth, but a smoother surface. And secondly, if the chippers on your dado set aren't set exactly level with each other either because the way they are manufactured or resharpened then that would leave little steps along your rabbet, which again is a pain in the neck to figure out. I mean, to sand out, sorry. So, where we're going is to figure out first the order of procedure. You just don't wanna go Willy-nilly, routing all the way around this, because what we wanna avoid in the end is any kinda, I found this out the hard way, is any kinda chip out at these inner corners right here. We want those to be as clean as possible, because we know when somebody picks this thing up, yourself especially, you're gonna catch any errors like that, it's just gonna look ugly as heck. So what I wanna do first, is to route the two ends of the lid. So if there's any tear at all, and there won't be 'cause I'm gonna be using a backer board when pushing the work through here, it would be way the heck out here and not at this corner. So, route the two ends first and then we're gonna come back and do as the long routing second. Now, this distance from here to here, is far wider than a standard router bit will handle. So, we're gonna take multiple passes to do this, and in the first pass, we're gonna just do it the same width as the bit, in this case, it's three quarters of an inch. And I know I will not go all the way to where I have to go with this. But the first step I think and before doing any routing is to kinda mark your lid, so that you know how far to set the fence on the final pass. And we're gonna shoot for that and when you make your last pass, we're gonna go a little bit under that and then just give the fence a couple of nudges with your hand until you get the fit just right. But let's go to the real box rather than this one, figure out what we need to do for measuring. So here's the actual box that we've got your actual lid. And it's really important to use real things here not the measurements in a cutting list or something like that because, you know, if you cut this a hair long, you put the dados in up here, wider spot, that changes everything. When we're talking about a 30 seconds of an inch or a 64th tolerance. So we'll measure this distance, the inner one. And I'll tell you what, I'm just gonna kinda mark that off on the lid here. Like this. Okay. That distance represents what the center of this must be. So then if I measure how far that's, what's left over, we'll see that this is about two and a half inches. So that means that I want to come in half of that distance on either end, half of two and a half, you have to write that down to get it right, is one and a quarter. So I'm gonna mark one and a quarter inches on both ends of the lid here. The best way to do that is with a combination square rather than use my ruler. Half of two and a half, one and a quarter. Turn the lid up on edge, and mark this in here. Turn this around and mark it again. So, that's where we're going to but I don't wanna route right up to that. Again, to reiterate the first pass is only gonna be three quarters of inch wide, the width of the blade have set the fence of the router table, in line with the far side of the router bit so it won't leave any feathery stuff. So, we're all ready to route. Let's clean everything off of here. When I pushed the board all the way through the router table, I don't want it to blow out on the backside of the board here. So, I'm going to put another board next to this one like this to back it up. And that way, the backside of this will blow out, no big deal. The backside of my workpiece will be just fine. And I can just hold these two together like this, get my hands well out of the way. Thank God, there's a nice guard here. So I won't get my fingers close to that. I'm just gonna push that right through the bit, spin it around and now we're off and running. So you can see here's the blow out, that's kinda inevitable on a cross grain cut like this, on the far side of your backer board, no big deal. Let's take a look at this board. That's perfectly clean, just fine. So, now we wanna reset the fence to take a second cut to get us close to that mark, but not right on it. To do that, I'm going to unplug my router because I want to make a very accurate measurement here, by spinning the bit around with my finger. Never do this with a machine plugged in. It really is handy to have a receptacle right on the side of your router table. So you don't have to march over to the receptacle on a wall and do this. And now, that will tell me exactly how far it's cutting from the fence by rotating the bit around like this and loosening the fence up. I can just kinda eyeball this to set it, oh, let's come within a 16th of an inch. We're just gonna be pretty conservative about that. Tighten the fence down. Okay. Now we're ready to roll again. So holding a board like this when you're routing is, can be really kinda tricky at first and you probably saw as I'd made my first initial pass, I haven't done this in a little while. It kinda kicked out a little bit like this. That's not unsafe, but it meant that it was making an irregular pass. I wasn't keeping the edge of the board tight against the fence. You just kinda have to figure out, how to hold a board like this. So, by wrapping my pinky around the end of the board like this, I can hold it tight against the fence. When I first started out, I didn't do that. I was just holding it like this, the natural action of the bit was decanted out a little bit like this. Doesn't give you a straight cut. Pinky here, tight against the fence, we're good to go. So let's make our second cut. Well, the good news is back to that little wiggly problem, is that if that happens to you, you haven't taken off too much. You just haven't taken off enough. You could go back to it with a second pass, holding the piece all the way against the fence, clean it up, no problem at all. Let's see how we're doing. The only way to do this is really to check, and that is to just hold this in here and compare, what you've taken off with how far you need to go. And boy, oh boy, are we awfully close? Good thing I stayed a 16th of an inch away. 'Cause between making all these measurements, marking it twice, doubles errors. Thickness of the pencil line, all kinds of things. So it's better to other than use a ruler, measure what you've taken off and compare that with a ruler to hear. Direct comparisons are best. So it looks as though in order to get the fit I'm after, I have to just tweak this fence just a little bit. And what I'm gonna do is, to then just to take one pass on one end, try it again. And if it isn't quite there yet, turn around and do the other end. If these ends are just a shade different from one another, I mean, who's to know except you and me. So no big deal. So, I'm gonna set this over here and my little trick for adjusting a fence just a little bit is to use something that indicates to me where the fence was, and when I can use that to show me where the fence will be when I give it a little nudge. So I'm just gonna lay this right up against the fence, loosen the fence like this, give it a little nudge with my finger, or fist that is bump it. And now I can see the gap here. Now the fence has moved, oh, I don't know, a 64th of an inch or so, let's bring it back again and give it a little tap. Not much. But of course the distance that it moved here, is greater than the distance it's moved here. You know, you can do the math and kinda figure all that out. But basically, if you just need a little tweak here, you can make a little more tweak over here. So we're not using numbers at this point. It's just using your eye to see how far that fence has to go. Okay, so one nudge with a fence. We can keep our backer board in place and we're just gonna cut one end of this thing. Okay. Let's try this out this way. Oh, nice shot. So, how much wiggle is that? I'm gonna butt it right up here, so I know I'm not holding it crooked, wiggle it back and forth and say, "Oh, that's just about right." I'm not even gonna measure it. It's just that little fit that I want. A little 64th of an inch or so, we're good to go. Okay, well now it's onto cutting the long sides and that's much the same thing in order to figure out how much you need to take off. You need to mark off this distance. The inner side against the end. So we're gonna do this. Of course, making all these marks is where your errors can crop up and that's why you wanna undershoot everything and then creep up to where you need to be. So it's the same problem as before we want to measure what's left over. Which is one and three-quarters of an inch, half of that. This is where you can really get screwed up, using fractions. But I do it this way. One in three quarters to me is seven quarters. Half of that is seven eighths. So I want to make a mark, seven eighths in from either side of the top using my square here. Okay, so seven eighths in here. Nice thing about using a square is that if I've marked it in the wrong place, or I need to make a mark on the other end or whatever it is this is always what it is. Seven eighths, I don't have to go back and make a second measurement with anything. And now I wanna set the fence up to take seven eighths off. Well, now wait a minute, that's only a three quarter inch bit, isn't it? So, I can't do the whole cut this time in one pass either. I'm gonna reset the fence to be flushed with a bit. And I think it can do this, just kinda eyeball that. We take a little bit less off, that's all right. And now we don't even need a backer board because when you're routing with the grain, down the length of a board, there shouldn't be any kinda blow out at all on the backside, actually it'll be in here. Remember those internal corners that we wanna worry about? They're gonna be just fine. So, can hold the board here and just make sure that my hands are far enough away from the blade that I'm not worried about it. This guard again is a really nice feature to have on any router table. I could also use a push pad just to be sure on something like this, because, I'll tell you what, if your piece bounces up and down a little bit as you're routing, you might wanna make a second pass as well, just to so you get a nice flat bottom. 'Cause the most difficult part of this whole operation is to end up with cut that are level all the way around. Now, usually, they aren't quite perfect and I'll have a way of using hand tools, that is really slick for evening that up. But let's finish the routing then I'll get to show you that. Okay, piece in. Take a second shot. Okay, well, let's see how we're doing. I mean, obviously, we're not gonna be up to our lines which are seven eighths in, but it's pretty hard to see where the line is and where the cut is. But if you just put a board like this, along what you've routed, you can exactly see the distance between the cut and your goal. So now we wanna reset this to again, something within a 16th of an inch or so just to be on the safe side of where we're going. So I unplugged the router because I wanna rotate this bit once more so that the tip, is at its farthest point from the fence, like that. And then use the mark on the board as a way of resetting the fence. Okay, so that looks like it's within a 16th of an inch, tighten the fence down, always double-check and plug her back in, we're good to go. Okay, well let's see how we're doing on this cut. So this is the distance here that we're trying to get here. It's a little harder to see, the only way you can do it really is just to lay it on there and kind of see where you're at. Which is a little difficult to do but you have to kinda eyeball it and see inside here. Another method that works is to literally tick off this distance here, on this stick as accurately as you can. Again, I'm not using a ruler because this, oops, I should use this side that doesn't have a cut on it. Okay, that's pretty close to the exact distance. And then just compare what you've done to that. And that will more clearly give you an idea of what more you have to take off than trying to sight down inside the box. I mean, it worked great on that first set of cuts for doing the end, but this siting method doesn't work so great on this side. So that tells me that I need to tweak the fence just a little more. And again, way better to make multiple passes here, tweaking this thing a little bit each time. Then to over cut and end up with a lid that's way too loose of fit. So I'm gonna use my stick method again to move it. That's a generous amount. So we're gonna route once and try it, and then route it second time. Okay, here we go. Make sure I can do is just use the stick method. Are we close? Ooh, I think I'm gonna make the second pass. 'Cause there's enough leftover. Of course, which side did I do? It doesn't matter. I'll just do 'em both. Now let's try it. And it's, oh, I can just feel it almost wanting to go in. But if I have to, I can get it in if I push. That's too tight, so we need to make one more adjustment. This is kind of a, you know, these things it's fussy. There's just no getting around it. If you wanna aim for super accurate work, you just have to do this. And that's, there just a little bit. Again, we can do the, I guess we can call it the one-two process. You cut once, try it out. But in this case, you know what I'm gonna do? Just to mark this, side number one. Okay, here we go. Here we are. So that second pass did it. It wiggles just a little bit side to side, which is just right. Okay, so now, the whole thing should just drop right in there. And I think what we have it at this stage it's good to see, well, does it fit the other way around or no? Let's see, yep. So we're golden on that. Now, let's take a look at what we've actually done here. We can see that the surface is pretty smooth. I don't see too many lips in here, where one passes overlapping the other, but there's still traces of the bid. It's not quite even, I can feel that. So we're gonna use another hand tool and even that up, get it just so, okay? Let's move on to making this lip all the way around the lid or rabbet, just perfect. Now I've routed a number of these tops because when I make these jewelry boxes, I always do them in multiples. I mean, it doesn't take a whole lot of wood and it's fun to make and give away as presents to my friends. This particular lid has some issues, because take it out of my jig here, you can see right here that the routing has left a step in the wood right here. And there's another one right here. Sometimes it comes out perfect, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't come out perfect, I wanna show you how to fix that. You know, the most logical way, I suppose, for most woodworkers would be just to get out a coarse sanding block, and just to have at it, which is, A, lot of work and B, just a pain because when you start out with coarse paper to get this kind of a step out, you're leaving in this case, scratched going across the grain, which are really hard to get out. I mean, just yet, the only way to do is to keep sanding in this way with a finer and finer grit paper, it's just annoying as all get out. But, of course, many years ago, cabinet makers came up with tools to solve problems like this. And here's the deal, you can't really use a block plane to fix this because all these bench planes and block planes, don't have a blade that extends all the way out to the edge of the plane, I'll duck kind of right? There's this lip on both sides here. So what cabinet makers use instead is a plane whose blade is the full width of the body of the tool. This is called a shoulder rabbet plane 'cause typically it's used way back in the good old days, for evening up the shoulders of tenants. But it's, used for all kinds of things these days. Now, a shoulder rabbet plane like this is a very expensive tool. You don't use it very much. So, I mean, I love these kinds of hand tools. So over the many years that I've been a cabinet maker, I've bought them gradually one at a time, rather than just whole-hog going and get the whole set, just as need arises. But this is a particularly nice shoulder rabbet plane for this application. They come in different sizes, different widths, different lengths. This is a relatively small one, but it just fits perfectly in my hand. And it's balanced just so. It's made by a company called Clifton, it's number 410. So, with this plane, because the blade goes all the way across, I can get right up to the edge here and plane off this step. I'll also be able to use this plane to put a small champ for all the way around the inner portion of this raised section of the lid. Remember that's where the lid fits down into the box. So to make that fit, just go silky smooth, rounding this over just a little bit will help that. So, let's put this in the jig. Again, this jig is invaluable for holding this kinda stuff. 'Cause now you've, you know, it was only a half inch piece before, now, it's even thinner than that. So trying to hold that with bench tongs is a pain. So let's use the same old technique here of whenever you have joints, that need to be evened up. And we're gonna do this at all the corners, because there's a little business here that we need to take care of. There's another one over here. Another one over here, is making the pencil mark across the joint. Of course in this case, it's not a joint it's just a step that we've introduced here. Will help to tell me when to stop planing. So, as usual, you want to get a little wax on the bottom of the sole. And I'm gonna start at the outer edge here. Plane all the way across. I don't wanna plane too far because this portion right here, is higher than that corner. So, I don't wanna lower that corner any more than I have to. But I do wanna get this even. So I'm gonna stop my strokes about there, and just walk the plane all the way across from the outer part, over at one, two, three like this. One, two, three. Now you can see that just started to take that pencil mark there. So I'm almost there. One more pass here should do it. There, and there, one more. Okay, now it's very hard to set the blade, is absolutely parallel to the sole of the plane. You know, you can get it in there a little crooked, or if you sharpen it in a bench plane, you can kinda tweak the position of the blade to make it parallel to the sole. But here, you have to sharpen it exactly square, so it ends up that way. But chances are, you're gonna be off a little bit. And what happens when you're making overlapping cuts is you scored just a little bit in one corner or the other. Well, that's no big deal, we aren't gonna fix this with sandpaper. That'll be just fine. It's crazy to be unrealistic about what to expect when you're doing this. So to make it perfectly level, that's the goal, but chances are you'll get it just so. So in holding this plane, it's very much like a bench plane. You want to start out with pressure down, on your leading hand and your trailing hand, just pushing forward. When you're halfway through, equal pressure down and forward, and when you're nearing the end of the cut, which I'm not worried about here because I didn't go off the end. You wanna relax the pressure down in your leading hand and just have your backhand pushing down and forward. So your muscles are changing the kind of pressure you apply whenever using any kind of plane, all the time. Can't see as that happen, when you're watching somebody plane. But that's what you gotta do. So now this corner is just fine, except for those little marks that we're gonna sand out. Now, we've got to take care of this little ridge right here. And in order to do that, now we're faced with a grain direction problem. Oh, you know what? I wasn't really faced with a grain direction problem going across the grain. Almost always when you plane in across the grain. Which takes less effort than going with the grain, by the way. But when you plane across the grain, grain direction is rarely an issue, so you could go either way. But if there is some tear out, then you would change your direction. But here you can't really read it the way you would read grain direction going with the grain. So which way do we go here? Do we go this way or do we go that way? Well, let's look again at the adjacent edge here and see which way the grain rises. It's kinda hard to make out, but right here I can see a growth ring coming up like this here and there's another one coming up like that there. So that means, petting the fur of the cat, I don't wanna go this way, that direction. So that's conveniently set up in the jig for me to play in that way. And what do I wanna do when I get here? Well, this corner is already lower than that, so I don't wanna take hardly anything off of here, so I can take a plane stroke and just stop around here somewhere. But my goal is to get rid of this set of pencil marks right there. Okay. So another thing with hand pressure is that I'm feeling the plane in this case, set against this lip here, but I'll take the first cut out here like this, and then move it over. Make another cut like that. Gone yet? Nope. One more, like this. One more like that, how are we doing? There's just a trace of a mark here. A little teeny lip there. I can barely feel it. I think we'll take one more. And now we're in sanding territory. So you just proceed like that all the way around. And although I can make this sound really easy, it's not quite that simple because when we're done, we don't wanna end up with the lid that is gonna wobble on the box. So after you have done this type of planning, you have to take the lid over to the box, rest it on it and make sure that you don't have a high spot somewhere or a low spot somewhere. Of course, you can take the high spots off, you can't add anything to the low spots. But we're gonna finish this up with a little sanding. Again, with 220 grit paper, that'll be fine. Especially, going across the grain 'cause as you know, sanding marks that go across the grain, are difficult to take out. But with the fine paper like this, that's really no problem. Okay, back and forth like this a little bit. What I wanna end up with is, erasing all traces of the plane, where it might've torn out the fibers a little bit. And it looks like I'd have to take a number of strokes of 220 in order to get those scratches out. And in fact, those aren't coming out quite yet. So, you know what I would do is to go back and use some slightly coarser paper, like 150 or something like that out, sand across the grain until they're gone and then graduate to the 220. Now, I still wanna take a small cut across here. And I got to hold the plane just so, so I can round this over, just a little bit. And I can certainly do this with sandpaper, but you know what? As long as I got the plane right here, sitting in my hand, what the heck, you can always take off wood faster with a plane than you can with sandpaper anyway. So I would go all the way around doing that, and then just give this a little bit of sanding like this. And then also, kinda double over the corners here that'll make the lid easier to sit down into the box. Okay, well, we're all done with the inner portion of the lid what's left is too plane the chamfers on the other side of the lid, the top chamfers. And while you can do that by hand, free hand, at least I think I can usually get away doing that, it is really difficult. So, I'm going to show you a cool jig I developed for planing that with a confidence and skill and precision. Well, the last step in making the lid is to lighten its appearance, by planning all around the outside. Making a bevel all around the outside, that will make the apparent thickness of the lid even thinner. Which is a nice touch on a jewelry box like this. So, I mean, I could do this on a router table. Maybe if I had a 45 degree bit, I'd have a pretty steep bevel, I'm not too crazy about that. I could maybe find another kinda router bit that would give me the right angle that I want. But you know, it's a lot easier and faster to do this by hand. So as I said, routing is fine, doing it by hand, more fun, more freedom, for what kinda shape you want. And here's the simple way to do it. That's just literally to clamp your lid down to the bench top, you're gonna have to use two clamps, so the lid doesn't spin around on you while you're planing it, that's we're gonna do. And I could either use at this point, a block plane or a bench plane. But I'm gonna choose the larger one just because, that will enable me to just bull my way through here a lot faster. But you know what? Before I get going on planning it, I've probably ought to mark it, so I can determine the boundaries of the bevel. So, I'm gonna use my a square, if I parked that thing. Set this to a half an inch, and mark this all the way around. So that's how far in I want this bevel. Oops. And then as for the thickness of the bevel, I think I'm just gonna eyeball this bugger and just draw a line like that and say, "Well about half the thickness or so will be fine." Mark that all the way around. And I'm good to go. Now, you could set your plane for a heavy cut at this point and readjust it to take a fine cut at the final pass. But, or have a, if you have a wealth of planes, have one set up for a heavy cut, pick up the second one set for a fine cut. But instead I'm just gonna leave this set where it was before when I was planning the surfaces of the all the parts and leave it at a fine cut. Which takes more passes but, the finer the cut, the less chance there is of making some huge divot, a tear out in the wood. So, doing it by hand like this, I'm just gonna kinda eyeball my progress and see how I'm doing. And adjust the angle of the plane accordingly. If I was trying to sat on a practice piece I could figure out that, oh, maybe if I held the plane about this distance from the edge of the lid, then I could just leave the edge of the plane sit on the bench top. And I would get automatically the angle I was after. Of course that's all done by eye, but that's kinda a little tricky. So I'm gonna turn this a little deeper cut. As I said before, when you want to make a deeper cut with a hand plane, here's the trick. You always wanna go from something to something more. If you've cut in too deep, you have to back the iron all the way out till it's not making any cut at all, and then start over again. And the reason for that is apparent, when you start taking a plane apart and you'll notice that the blade isn't fit in there really tightly. In other words, when you take the lever cap off you can move the blade up and down like this in its mechanism. And that means that if I'm backing the plane blade back up to make a slightly shallower cut, there's no part of the plane is, mechanism is not holding the blade down forward. So we can creep up the sole of the plane. Now the front of the plane, I beg your pardon. And you'll go from just a little cut to no cut at all without having made any change in its adjustments which can just be frustrating as all get out. So, as I said, the deal was when you make a deeper cut, easy, you just turn the wheel here until it forces the blade lower. But if you go on too far where you wanna readjust, you back all the way out and then start going back down again. So we've set this to a slightly thicker cut, so we can take off. You can just hear the difference, more of a shaving. Okay. So I'm just gonna see my progress. How close am I getting to that line versus how close am I getting to that line? And you want the, it's a little tricky to judge that 'cause it's not like the distance has have to be equal but you just wanna be able to feel, you make adjustments at the last minute to hit your lines. I'll tell you, I make a bunch of these jewelry boxes all at the same time. And that means I have a lot of lids to plane. So doing it all this way by hand and by guessing is kind of a pain in the neck. So instead I come up with a simple jig to help me lock in the angle at which the plane will be planing this thing. So let me show that to you. I mean, I could keep on going here, but it gets kinda boring. Let's just take this thing out, off the bench here instead. Bring my cleaning jig into play here. Now this thing looks pretty crazy fancy, but it really isn't. I've made it adjustable, as you can see these screws here, so that every time I make these lids, and they usually turn out to be just a little bit different this way. When I do one batch, you know, one month another batch and another month, something like that, I can trap this lid in here just perfectly. 'Cause I don't want this thing to wiggle around at all when I'm planing. And I found the hard way that even though you might set these pieces in once, nail them down, so it's just a perfect fit. The next batch is gonna be just slightly different. So instead as you can see, these are just loose pieces of quarter inch MDF on here. Some screws with slots that allow me to adjust the fit of these pieces around this. And then I'm putting this in here, like let's turn it around this way. Like this, okay. And clamp this down to the workbench. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this, because if I just pass the plane down this channel right here, I'm locked into an angle. So it took me a little while to figure out what the distance between here should be, the edge of the top, the hole in the center of the jig, but it's not too hard to figure out. But anyway, this gives me the same, not the same angle every time I plane of course, because the plane's gonna start tipping down, down, down, down like this with each pass. But what that this does is allow you to have a nice straight even pass, go all the way through the board without even thinking about it. And I don't have to try and tweak this angle as I'm going it's being automatically set by the edge of the plane sitting against this little piece of wood here. So all I have to do with my jig here is to keep planing until I hit my mark. And I'll automatically hit my depth of cutline, that won't be a problem at all. So just have to worry about this pencil line and tell you if I'm just close to it, I'm golden. Here we go, pencil line is gone. So that's all set. And now to do the other end. I just wanna swivel this around, stick it back in there, and repeat the same operation. And while we're looking at this, I just wanna show you how this works, because you don't remember the lid is different all the way around here. I mean the distance here and the distance here is different. That means that this distance from here to here and from here to here has gotta be different also to accommodate that. So let me just tell you what those distances are if you wanna make one of these things for yourself, would be a lot easier. This one turns out to be for my lid, two inches exactly. And this one is two and seven sixteens. And these are just pieces of quarter inch MDF nailed down to this piece of plywood. These are pieces of half inch MDF. So I cut these strips of MDF and just nail them down to this piece of plywood. And just kinda arranged all this like a puzzle. And the design for this thing is, well, I've never made one of these before. So I kinda had to make it up as I go is such that you could, it allows your plane to pass all the way through the cut, going both directions. That's why there's this kind of a cross shape to it. Now you also have to of course worry about grain direction when you're planing these bevels as well. So when I'm looking at this side here, I'm seeing a sign that the grain is going to change direction dramatically. And remember, we were worried about that before on the underside of the top. So I can see that the grain is rising this way. And just to remind myself with that, I'm just gonna draw an arrow on here. That's the way I want to plane this top. So let's put this back in here. And now I'm faced with a classic dilemma. Well, okay, I'm right-handed, I normally want to plane this way, but in this case to avoid tear out, I have to plane that way. Can you do that kinda right handed? It doesn't really work. It's not unusual when you're planing is to learn how to be a bit ambidextrous and hold the plane in your other hand like this, switch hands around and just go the opposite direction. Oop, they come out of there a little bit? Let's tap that back in. Okay, is that a half inch now? Right on the money. So when I set my plane to a heavy cut like this, it takes more force obviously to push. So when I kinda get up a little ahead of steam when I'm making a cut like this, and just set myself up for a heavy push, right to get going, it's kind of like just starting to push a refrigerator across the floor or something like that. That initial effort takes more oomph than it does to carry the plane all the way through the cut. So the first cut, just like that, force your way through it. Now to do the ends is pretty much the same thing. I found out that it doesn't really matter whether you do the long sides first or the short sides first for the most part. So let's do these short sides. And again, I'm not too worried about grain direction until I observe any problems. Each time I pull the plane back, I lifted off the work. You couldn't really see that. But what you don't wanna do is whenever you're planing something is just to drag the plane back level with the surface and drag the iron back over the wood, 'cause that serves to dull it prematurely. So every time I pull the plane back after a stroke like this, I'm lifting up on the tote right here, and that raises the blade above the surface of the wood. You can't even hardly see it happening. But here's how quick this goes, and of course, you wanna keep on planing not only until you hit your mark, but what I'm really after, I got to turn this around to do the other end, oops, okay. So here's what I want is when I'm done planing, I want the two bevels to intersect perfectly with each other so that their midline right here goes right from this corner down to the exact corner of the edge of the lid. Let me show you again how that works. I'm gonna start planning this other end. Okay well, as to get a better understanding of where I'm going, let's turn this lid around, so you get a better angle of seeing it. And we can see my progress, here's the line that I'm making. The intersection between the two bevels that is. It starts here and it ends here. And what I want to do is to keep planing until it starts up here and goes right exactly to the corner. So this is the current intersection of the two lines. This is my goal, is to get it to right there. Here, regardless of what that line tells you, this is the real goal, is to hit this perfect angle all the way from here to here. Okay, let's stick this back in the jig. That's another advantage of having this jig locking in your angle, makes hitting these lines far, far easier than doing it free hand. I know from experience. So as I'm planning, I wanna check my progress at both ends of this. And I can see right now for instance, that I'm closer here to getting right to the corner than I am here. So what I need to do is take a little bit more off this portion of the top and hardly anything back here. You know, and that's a natural result of having to take, oh, I don't know, 15 or 20 cuts. Your pressure is always gonna be a little bit different every time you pick up the plane, it's not uncommon at all to take off more on one end than the other. It's just the way it happens. So in order to do that, I don't wanna take off this thick shaving anymore either. 'Cause I'll tell you that would just, I'd be there before I knew it, and I would also leave a big crease mark here. So what I wanna do is to reduce the amount of shavings I'm taking, the thickness of that shaving by backing the iron up a little bit. And then remember when you back it up, then you have to turn this again to make it go down and down just a little bit. And let's see, I'll probably sit at no shaving. Now, that's ideally where you wanna be. And then just keep adjusting this until you find that you're gonna take just the thickness of the shaving you want, which is just a hair in this case. So, what I'm doing in order to say, take just a small shaving on this portion, pushing the plane forward, and when I get to the point where I wanna stop the cut, I don't literally just stop the plane. What I do instead kinda subtle, is to lift up on the back end of the plane, and it kinda glides the plane out of the cut. So instead of ending up with a crease mark here, a sudden stop mark, what I'm ending up with is a very slight little ramp up. So again, I don't wanna take anything off here. I just wanna keep going until this line is perfect. I'm picking this up a lot more than I would, and I'm taking such a fine shaving, it's not making much progress. So let's adjust this one more time. And I'll tell you on most planes like this, a one o'clock adjustment is plenty. You know, a whole quarter of a turn, That's a major change from thin to thick. But in this case a one o'clock, just barely like that, Maybe not even half of that, a 30-minute adjustment is all I wanna make. There we go. And I'll tell you what, if I overshot that other corner by accident, you know, and plane too deep, which would change where the line goes. Definitely not the end of the world, because what I could do to fix that is just to come back and plane the opposite direction and make the lines meet again. Let's say that I overshoot this mark a little bit, and I planed too much right here. Well, it's easy to fix 'cause all I got to do then is to change the orientation of the board and the jig and plane this side a little bit more, and bring the line back to where it has to be. And the fact that these bevels don't end up exactly, precisely the same width, well that's no big deal at all. So let's see how I'm doing here. I'm almost there, that's right almost to it. Another pass like that, and I'm good. And now I wanna see if my lifting up the plane has left any kind of irregularity here. It's not too bad. I can take one stroke or so all the way through. One more until I hear it cut the full length. That changed this hardly at all 'cause I've set now the plane to a light shaving. And that meant that this is one long, smooth, straight surface, and I'm good. Just feel this all around. So a little light sanding after this, easing of the corners, and my lid is done. And it's off to finishing land. I'm using one of my favorite finishes on this box. I like it a little awful lot because it's easy to apply. It's just a wipe on wipe off linseed oil based finish called Antique Oil. And because it's linseed oil based, it adds a certain, a little yellow cast to the wood, which is just great on a cherry. Looks terrific on Walnut, too. And of course the nice thing about a wipe on wipe off finish is that I can get into the corners easily. If this was a film finish, just the varnish or something like that, applied with a brush, it'd be a real drag to have to brush into all these corners and then sand later. But with this wipe on finish, this is a piece of cake. Of course, any box is gonna have these problems but this one has it in spades because of these overhanging sides here. And of course getting into the inside of the box it was another difficulty, but again, with a rag and a wipe on wipe off finish, this is no big deal. Put it on like this. And this will take, you know, more than a few coats. This finish is actually a little bit thicker than say a danish oil, which is really just an oil, it doesn't really build up to a film, but three or four coats of this type of finish and since there's some varnish mixed in with it will give you a thicker build and more protection, which is terrific for a jewelry box that'll be handled a lot. Of course, one thing you should know, about any linseed oil-based finish is that when you're done with your rags, you got to take them outside right away, hang them up to dry. Don't let them dry inside your house, that's asking for trouble. You know what happens to oily rags? They can spontaneously combust, sorry, start a fire, really ugly. So just take them outside, put them on a clothes pin or drape them over a clothesline line or something like that. And when they're dry and hard, they're perfectly safe, you can just throw them in the trash at that point. So the other thing that I got to pass on to you is that when you're working on a project like this, especially this lid, which have you have to finish both sides of, you really got to just finish the one side first for instance, the top here and go all the way around it, and even the ingrain like this. And if I finish the bottom at the same time I got like nowhere to put it. So it's not a bad idea just to apply your finish all the way around, and then just don't do the other side. It means more time finishing but it's not that big a deal to go through all this. And you get to see how pretty your wood is too, which is pretty nice after all that planning and sanding and hard work. This is the point where everything comes home. So I hope you enjoyed watching this. This is a great project. Hope you can make a lot of them yourself.