[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] It's time again for another episode of "The Wordsmith Shop."

Now, I think there's no more versatile cutting tool in your shop than a band saw.

On today's episode, we're going to put that to the test by making some boxes and all the operations, except a few, you are going to take place right at the band saw.

It's time to find a nice piece of wood and start cutting.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ And by... Inventables -- tools for designing and building your products.

Inventables.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ You know, band saw boxes have been around for a long time and these are three examples of what you can do with band saw boxes.

You know, band saw boxes are a load of fun.

They use a lot of different shapes that we might normally not use in woodworking, you can use scraps that you already have, and people love them as gifts.

Another thing I like about band saw boxes is that, unlike a lot of other woodworking projects, you can get them done in such a really short amount of time.

Exactly.

And, because they take a small amount of material, they're quick to do, you can experiment with different techniques that you might not invest in a large project and, if it works, great; if it doesn't, you don't have a ton of time and material invested in it.

So, on today's episode, we're going to look at three different band saw boxes and each of the techniques are going to build on each other as we go along.

But, since there's three of us, I thought we'd maybe change up either materials or maybe the look of the boxes.

Now, one thing you will want to do, when you go to make band saw boxes, and that's tune up your band saw.

You want a brand-new, sharp, 1/8-inch blade and work with those guides and get them set just right.

If you want to make your own band saw box, the plans are at our website...

Otherwise, I think, Chris, we'll start with your box.

Alright.

The first project we're going to do on today's show is this lidded box.

You can see it's got a really pretty form to it.

It's made out of curly maple.

So, if you've got a special piece of wood, well, now's the time to use it.

For our box today, I decided to choose a backyard beauty.

This is a piece of American elm that I cut down a few years ago from my backyard.

You know, with band saw boxes, it's all about the sequence of cuts.

So, the first step to create this lidded box is going to be to cut at 12° the perimeter of the box.

Now, as you can see here, I have a template on my blank, so I'm ready to go.

Once I get that 12° perimeter cut done, I'm then going to tilt my table on the band saw back to 90° and I'm going to slice off a blank for the top.

And, when we're done with that, it'll be time to think about the interior.

Well, I've got the basic shape of my box cut out and I've separated the lid from the main body.

So, what's up next?

I've restrung my band saw with an 1/8-inch blade and I've set the table at 12°.

What's next is that I'm going to cut out the interior plug.

Well, one of the things I need to decide is where to enter my cut.

What I'd like to do is find a spot where the cut will follow the grain so, when I get back together, it'll be invisible.

I also want to make sure that that cut will blend in seamlessly with the perimeter of my plug, so everything will be nice and smooth on the interior of the box.

So, once we're done cutting the interior plug out, what's next?

Well, we'll be able to deal with the bottom of the box and also the plug that keeps the lid centered.

Well, as you can see, I've separated the plug from the body of the box.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and pinch the sides of my box closed, closing this curve up, and I'm going to drop the plug in place.

Now, as you can see, the plug extends out the bottom of the box by about 3/16 of an inch and that's because of the material the band saw blade removed when we were cutting it free.

What I'm going to do is take my pencil and I'm going to mark how far it extends out the bottom.

I'm then going to set up my band saw and I'll trim that much material off the plug.

I can then set up a fence and separate the bottom of the box off from this plug and also cut the plug, which helps keep the lid centered.

Well, it's time to glue things up.

So, what I'm going to do is start by putting some glue into the curve of the sides of our box.

And I'm going to use a card here and kind of force the glue in, make sure it's covering both sides.

That looks pretty good.

Now, this is sort of an awkward shape to glue up, so, what I'm going to do is use a piece of surgical tubing.

Surgical tubing is really great for these odd-shaped parts.

It has sort of a grip to it and it's very easy to apply.

There we go.

Next up, I'm going to go ahead and glue my bottom in place, so a little glue all along the edges.

And drop it in place.

Now, I'm not being very careful about my glue or about the interior surfaces, and the reason is all of that is going to be covered with flocking later on, so I don't have to spend a lot of time sanding and I don't have to worry about an accidental glue stain on the inside.

Next up, I need to glue the plug to the bottom of my lid.

Now, I experimented a little bit by putting a piece of double-sided tape on the bottom of the plug and making sure that I had it located correctly on the lid so it centered nicely on my box.

Once I had that done, I made a light pencil line, so I'd know where to put the plug when I glued it on.

Now, earlier, I did sand the bottom of my lid, since that is actually going to show, but the plug itself, I just lightly sanded because, like the interior of the box, it's going to be covered with flocking.

Well, that's the glue-up.

And, while I wait for the glue to dry, the next thing I'm going to do is make the handle.

I then need to thoroughly sand everything, glue the handle on, apply a finish, and then, it'll be time to flock the bottom of the lid and the interior of my box.

My band saw box project is a hinged lid box and it's got a couple of cool features.

First is the overall shape.

Kind of reminds me of a radio that sat on the counter in my grandma's kitchen.

The other is the styling of it.

Now, it uses some unusual materials -- three layers of cherry, not that unusual, but sandwiched between them are two layers of 3/4-inch Baltic birch plywood.

And, here, something that we normally hide on plywood, those exposed edges, is now put on display, as if it's pinstriping or inlay.

So I'm going to take the same concept, but go in a little bit of a different direction.

What I'm doing here is using two outer layers of black walnut and then two more layers of, this time, 1/2-inch Baltic birch plywood.

On the inside, I have two layers of European beech.

It's a lighter-colored wood, but I like that this stuff has some nice-looking quartersawn ray flecking on the upper surfaces.

And then, running right down the middle, like a pinstripe, is a layer of 1/4-inch plywood.

So I'm going to glue this together and then, we'll get started on the project.

The big thing here is making sure that you get even glue coverage on all of your surfaces.

Doesn't have to be a lot, but you don't want any visible gaps that are going to cause the pieces to delaminate later on.

When I'm clamping up, the big thing here is keeping the pieces aligned.

Once it's dry, we can get to the fun part.

Now, because this box gets cut to shape, the outside condition of the box once it comes out of the clamps, isn't that big a deal.

The only thing that I really want is a smooth end and to have a nice, flat, smooth bottom.

So you can do that with a little bit of sanding.

The first thing that we need to do is to cut out a pattern and attach it to one end.

The plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

From there, we'll go over to the drill press and we'll drill a hole near the back edge and that's going to be for a brass pin that acts as a hinge for the lid.

Now, what we'll do, here at the band saw, is to cut it to shape.

So we're going to start by cutting out this recess for the feet and then, this outer profile.

Now, once you stand this on end, there's a lot of material here, so a good, sharp blade and a slow and steady pace are going to give you the best results.

Now, when I'm working on the underside cut, I'm going to make some relief cuts in the corners and that helps the waste to fall away and helps the blade to navigate the tighter corner.

Before going any farther with the band saw, you want to take some time to smooth out your surfaces that you just cut.

A nice, sharp blade is going to leave them pretty smooth, but taking care of a lot of the heavy sanding now is just going to be a lot easier to do.

So what we want to do now is turn our attention to excavating the inside of the box.

But, before we do that, we have to get the two ends out of the way.

So what I'm going to do is bring the rip fence over... ...set it in place, and, now, I'll just take a slice off of each end of this piece of bread here.

Removing the ends of our boxes also means that we've cut away our first pattern, so we need to do now is print out and attach a second pattern, and this one is going to show us something a little bit different.

The first one was for the outside shape.

This one is going to define the shape of the lid of the box, as well as the lower inside compartment of the box.

Here again, you'll notice that there's some pretty nice flowing curves there, so, follow those closely with the blade, to reduce the amount of cleanup you're going to do, and you'll end up with a great-looking box pretty quickly.

Let's step away from the band saw a little bit for a sanding public service announcement.

Before you start gluing the box back together, what we need to do is smooth out the inside of the box and the underside of the lid.

Now, these two places are a little tricky to do, just because of all the inside curves.

Now, I really don't enjoy spending a lot of time sanding, so I usually turn to some hand tools.

So I'll use a round file and a half round file to remove the bulk of the waste.

It goes pretty quickly with these two tools.

And then, I really like using card scrapers to be able to just scrape and smooth away any of the marks left by the files, and they'll be able to follow through on those inside curves.

Now, how far you want to go here depends on what you're going to do on the inside of the box.

Now, Chris is going to put flocking on the inside of his.

That's an option.

Or an adhesive-back felt or velvet would be a great choice here, too.

If you're going to go with a natural finish, then, obviously, you want to sand quite a bit higher and then, that's when you want to reach for the sandpaper.

So what I want to do now is apply just a little bit of glue on the edges of the box compartment.

Go easy here, because squeeze-out is going to be a real pain to clean up.

I'm going to use my built-in glue brush... ...disposing of the excess appropriately.

Then, I'm going to bring the sides in place.

The big thing here is keeping those front and back edges aligned as you put the clamps on.

Alright, last order of business before we walk away is to take a moment to size the lid.

Now, theoretically, it's going to be a piston fit in there, so you want to plane and sand the edges, so that you'll be able to open and close the box pretty easily.

Now, once we let this dry, we can then go back over to the band saw for the last cutting steps.

Alright, there's one last step we need to take care of for making this box here at the band saw.

And what we're going to do is we're going to create a bevel on each end here.

Now, in order to do this, I set up a very large kind of auxiliary fence because, in order to tilt the band saw table to create that bevel, I needed to put the fence on the right-hand side of the blade.

Some fences allow you to do that.

Others, you're just going to have to do an auxiliary fence, like this one.

So I'm going to set it up and then, I can run the edge of the box along one side, flip the box around, and make a second pass.

You'll notice that I'm going to leave just a little bit of a flat spot there and I can smooth that out with some sanding later on.

Beveling the ends of the box, there's a small flat that's left over, to help register the box on the fence, but you can just use a block plain and smooth up everything so it has a nice, even-tapered face there.

What we can do now is fit the lid in place using some small brass pins that fit into the holes that you drilled earlier.

And you can just clip them and sand them flush.

Now, one thing that I noticed is that, in cutting out the curve for the lid, now, the lid sits just a little lower than the sides.

But while I'm doing my final sanding, I'll bring those sides down so everything's nice and flush.

Then, I'll ease the edges, put on a finish for the big reveal at the end of the show.

Creating a band saw chest of drawers like this guy is an interesting task because we have to cut out this opening for these drawers.

To do that, we have to cut in from the sides of the case after the case has been shaped.

So when I'm picking out a block for something like this, I want to make sure I'm picking out something that has straight grain.

That's going to help hide the saw curves after we make them and we glue it back together.

So let's go and get a pattern applied to this, then, we'll head over to the band saw and cut out the box.

For the chest of drawers pattern, the first thing we need to do is cut out the outside shape of the chest.

So I'm going to start down here in the corner and make the side cuts, probably exiting off into the waste area, on both sides, then, we'll come in and do these tight-radius cuts, to create the feet and then, that gentle, sloping curve to the top.

Okay, so, now that we have the outside shape cut, we can cut off the back because the next step is going to be to cut the drawer openings and we don't want the openings to go through the back.

We want the back to be solid.

So I'm going to set the fence, rip off the back, then, we'll switch out the blade for a little bit thinner blade.

So with our back removed, we can go ahead and cut the drawer openings.

Now, to do this, it takes a little bit of planning.

First, I'm going to try to angle my cut in from the side and cut along this top, smooth portion of the drawer.

Then, we'll work our way around the corners, down the bottom, and back into the curve we made.

Now, it's important to take our time as we do this because any errant cut is going to show up in our drawer front.

We don't want that.

So I'll cut one drawer opening from one side and then, I'll flip it around and cut the other drawer opening from the other side.

That way, when we glue it all back together, the compression stays pretty even.

Okay, so, the case is cut out.

I have the drawer plugs that we cut out.

Now, we need to turn these into drawers.

We're going to do that by cutting off the front and the back with the fence and then, I'm going to use a pencil to just kind of rough in the outline of the drawer sides and bottom.

Then, I'll cut out the waste.

The size of it doesn't really matter, as long as it's even, fairly consistent, and it fits back in the opening.

So let's go ahead and get these cut, then, we'll head back to the bench and get everything glued back together.

Okay, so, with everything cut out, we can glue it all back together.

The first thing I'm going to do is glue the case down.

We're going to squish it down with a couple of clamps and, once that's dry, we'll glue that back on to make our case for our chest of drawers.

So let's start by getting some glue in here.

And, now, with a curved top, I can't get good clamping pressure, so I'll just bring in the scrap that we cut off there and use that to get everything lined up.

Okay.

Now, we'll let that dry before gluing the back on.

But we need the drawers put together, too.

So, with the drawers, the biggest thing is just to make sure that you watch the grain that you cut off and line it back up to where it came from.

Don't flip the front and the back, if you can help it.

Okay, there we go.

So, once everything's dry and I get back glued on, we can sand everything flush.

And, because we squished the case down, we might need to do a little extra sanding on those drawers, to get them to slide in nice and easy, but, once they fit, you're ready for some finish and some flocking.

Adding flocking to a project, such as these band saw boxes, is a great way to add a little elegance to it.

And, on these boxes, in particular, the flocking does a couple of things.

First, when you open up the box, it's a nice pop of color and it adds that luxurious feel.

On a box such as this chest of drawers, it's actually functional, as well.

When you open it up, you can have a color on the inside, but then, by flocking the opening, you actually add to the ease of use and it causes those drawers to slide just a little bit easier.

The third reason I like flocking is it can actually eliminate some of the sanding that you need to do on the inside of a box like this or on the inside of the drawers.

So, to add flocking to the inside of our boxes, we need to start with a flocking kit.

Now, those kits are going to come with the flocking material and, a lot of times, it's available in different colors.

We're going to need adhesive that matches the flocking material.

So, in this case, I have some black adhesive that matches the black flocking.

We also need a way to apply it.

A lot of times, they come with a flocking gun or a canister, a little cardboard tube, that you can use, you fill the flocking up, then, after you apply the adhesive, you simply pump it to puff out the flock onto the adhesive and let it sit.

So let's go ahead and get the inside of this painted with some of this adhesive.

Okay.

So we want a good layer of adhesive exactly where we want the flocking.

Be careful not to get it in areas that you don't want flocking because the flocking will stick.

Let's get that out of the way.

And, now, we're going to fill up the flocking gun.

Okay.

And, now, we pump it and shoot the flocking in.

Okay, and you want to go until you see all the sheen from the adhesive disappear.

And, if you use too much flock, that's not a problem.

We'll let this sit for about 14 to 20 hours, then we'll come back, we'll shake all the extra flocking out and actually use a little brush to brush out any loose stuff and all that flock that you get out after the adhesive is dry can go right back in the bag and get reused again.

Well, I hope on today's episode, you got a little excited and perhaps a little inspired to try making your own box right at the band saw.

You can explore any of these design options or, with the techniques that you've learned, try something totally different and then, next time, we'll see you right back here in the Woodsmith Shop.

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Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD, or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ And by... Inventables -- tools for designing and building your products.

Inventables.com.