A secret box - a box within a cabinet

This secret box is part of a complex curiosity cabinet I made a few years back – I’ll get round to posting the cabinet sometime. The box is disguised as a couple of the cabinets interior drawers.

Its veneered in red maple with stringing to match that on the cabinet. It has shell inlays on its back – actually the false drawer fronts. These match the other cabinet drawers. The shell inlays were purchased from a luthier supplier in Vietnam to special order at around US$50 each, and are book matched on each drawer front. Despite each drawer having left and right hand paired inlays which look the same, they were all slightly different! Which meant the 16 on the on the eight drawers, and the two on the outside of the theater doors all had to be cut separately. I had thought I could stack cut each pair of book matched fonts (4 for each design) as a packet – alas no!!!

The interior of the box has a parquetry lid – some of you may recognise the design from Pierre’s books.

The interior of the box has my usual hidden compartments and a false floor, plus a Japanese puzzle box in the middle. This I think takes something like 15 moves to get open. This part was purchased as a kit, but is still hand veneered, and needs to be glued up very carefully glued together under pressure to ensure there are no gaps.

This box was the most exacting one I have ever made. Those of you into veneered boxes will know that usually the finished size isn’t important, if its a bit bigger or smaller than you originally intended then no problem. HOWEVER if the veneered box then has to fit into precise space, like a drawer opening then, there is no room at all for error. You can’t sand or plane a bit more off the sides to make it fit, otherwise you’ll go through the veneer. When you push the box in, the drawers above and below it are ‘blown’ out – its such a good fit!! The other interesting problem with the box was hinging it’s lid. You can’t have normal hinge knuckles sticking up or the box wouldn’t fit in its hole. So I used barrel hinges – not the most robust of hinges, and quite difficult to line up in the lid and front, but they gave the desired result.

As at taster to my curiosity cabinet Ancient and Modern. The last picture shows its interior with this secret box removed – sorry I look so glum!!! The main doors of the cabinet have two different marquetry panels, based on similar panels on Jean-Henri Riesener furniture of the 1780’s. Again taken from Pierres’ books.

Finally here’s a picture of the contents of the cabinet you can just see the ‘secret box’ stacked up on the left on top of a few of the other drawers.

And yes I’ll get round to posting full details and pictures of the cabinet sometime – thanks for looking.

-- Madburg WA