two little boxes

Two little boxes, one a valet box for me, the other for a temp secretary we had at work. The sides are white ash, top and bottom red oak. The oak comes from pallets, but I had to rive the wood out with a froe, the only way I could figure out how to re-saw the 2 inch thick pallet wood with nails every few inches. The black lines on the inside are the nail holes. The hinge is just a dowel pivot.
The ash is very hard to plane – the last time I worked with some from the same batch I had to scrape for hours. But I recently ground a 15 degree back bevel (thanks Leonard Lee) on my smoother and it planed up the ash great.
I wish I had made the tails smaller on the dovetails.

-- Jeremy, in the Acadian forests