Simple Pine Boxes

So what do you do when you wife breaks perfectly good boards in half with her bare hands….

My wife was training for her 4th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, which she achieved and is now a master instructor. She needed some wood to practice her breaks. The wood that they prefer to use is 12”x12” white pine. They like pine since it is easy to break and not a dense wood, it also has a nice “pop” to it when it breaks. So I got her some 1”x12” from Home Depot. This stuff is actually pretty nice, almost knot free and since it is so wide it comes from the center of tree it ends up being quartersawn.

Anyways I have been reading Paul Sellers book Working Wood and jumping around to the different projects. First was building the work bench (which I will post later) and then this box since I had lots of nice straight grain pine laying around. This was my first attempt at hand cut dove tails and using Paul’s technique of rounding over the edges with a #4. I finished them with Zinsser amber shellac and paste wax. Over all they came out pretty good, there is defiantly room for improvement, but I guess there always is…

The boxes were almost entirely made with hand tools, starting with my wife’s rough dimensioning. I made the rip cuts to the final width with my table saw but after that it was all hand tools, including ripping and planing some of the wood down to 1/2” on one of the boxes.

Thanks for looking
Doug