I finally broke down and decided to build the School Box from the Chris Schwartz’s “Joiner and Cabinet Maker” book. Been wanting to do this for years, bought the wood for it a while back, and finally have an opening in my schedule. The objective is to make this entirely by hand, and I will try and document it over time.
The Wood is 4/4 Pine, 7-1/2” wide. This means, just like in the book, I will have to join two pieces together for each of the sides to get to the 9-1/2” width. The front & back are 15” long, while the sides are 10” long. The final thickness will be ¾”.
So after initial surfacing, crosscutting to rough size and jointing the edge, I glued up the pieces using liquid hide glue. After that, I had to plane down the first surface, joint the edges to final width, and crosscut the pieces to final length. I used the shooting board to sneak up on the final length.
From there, I marked out the orientation of the boards using triangles, then laid out and sawed out the tails. Then I used a chisel to cut out the tails and clean them up. I typically “gang” the two pieces on top of each other, chisel out down to the first half, then flip them over to clean them out.
Once the tails are chiseled out and cleaned up, I then use my joiners bench to lay out the pins, trying my best to make the marks accurately and not move the tail pieces. Any improper layout and markup will lead to poor fitting dovetail joints.
Once marked out, its time to saw the pins out, and then chisel out the large tails. For any chisel work I make sure to “undercut” the chisel lines in order to create a small dish in the wood. This helps the dovetail to go together easier.
