[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] You know, whenever I can't be out in my workshop woodworking, I like to read about woodworking in my home.

So on today's episode of "The Woodsmith Shop," I'm going to kind of mix those two together.

The project that I'm going to be making is something that looks like a book, but is actually a box.

We're going to look at two different formats here, one with an upright orientation with a sleeve to be able to store items in.

And another one that's designed to lay flat like a drawer.

But before we do that, Logan's going to get us started by making a turned box over at the lathe.

He even has a couple little fun ways to customize and accentuate the design of that particular box.

If you're ready to build along with us, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's time to get started!

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Kreg.

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

And by...

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We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Turning at the lathe isn't limited to spindle parts or tool handles or even bowls.

Do you know you can make something like a box here?

That's right.

For our project right now we're going to turn this little box that we called a drum style box.

It has a nicely curved side and then a fun little detail is this pewter inlay on top.

Now we can actually melt that, pour it into a mold and then turn that here at the lathe as well.

It's a super fun process that adds a little bit of elegance to a turning project.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to choose our stock.

Now one of the things I like about turning is that every project is slightly different.

We might have the original here in our hands, but our stock might designate that this one we're going to make is a little bit different.

The stock I have here is slightly smaller in diameter, so it's going to be a little bit skinnier than this drum box.

And I'll probably make it a little bit shorter as well.

So I'll go ahead and cut this down to size.

And then I'll go ahead and turn this around with a spindle roughing gouge.

Okay.

There we go.

So I have this turned basically round.

I have a little flat here, but at this point I can go and start laying out where my parts need to go.

Now, looking at the original, we can see that we have a lid and a base.

Now I can eyeball where these are going to sit.

It doesn't really matter necessarily.

On this original one what we did is we had set it up so that the grain lined up when the box was closed.

So it kind of looks like a continuous piece.

You can see the seam a little bit, but the grain lines up Because we are going to do a special treatment on the outside of this, I'm not terribly concerned about that.

So I'm actually going to separate out the lid from the base a little bit.

So I'm going to leave a little bit of room down here where I'm going to create a tenon.

And that tenon is going to be held in the chuck.

And then I need to ballpark about where the base is going to go.

And keeping in mind, because this is a smaller diameter, I'm actually going to shrink the height of this a little bit to just to keep the proportions correct.

So I think probably right about in there is going to be good at least as a starting point.

And the lid needs about that much room.

And then this extra here we'll use for a mold that we'll pour the molten pewter into.

So at this point, what I can do is go ahead and bring a parting tool in, square off this end, and create a tenon.

And that tenon is going to be sized to fit my chuck.

And then I'll go ahead and part this piece off that has the top on it.

Alright, so now I have my blank that originally started like this.

And I've put a tenon on each end and that tenon's sized to fit in the four-jaw chuck here.

So what we'll do is identify which one's the bottom.

They're pretty much the same size, so it doesn't really matter.

I'll go ahead and pop that in there.

And the biggest thing here is to make sure that I have good inward pressure on the tops of the jaws.

And that's going to keep that blank true as I tighten it up.

Okay.

So now with that blank in there, I want to check and see how it's running.

It looks like it's running pretty true.

But I'm going to shape the outside a little bit.

So bringing in the original I can see that I have to kind of slope this in.

And pretty much the widest part of this box is where that junction is.

So that's going to be right here.

Now what I'm going to do is kind of step this down in steps, and then I'll make one full cut to kind of blend that shape.

I'm going to leave it a little fat, however, because once we get this lid turned to fit on top of here, I'll go ahead and make a final cut with that lid in place so everything blends together nicely.

Now, the other thing that I have to do is I have to create the joint between the lid and the box, and what that ends up being is basically a tenon that fits into a mortise on the lid.

And that has to be sized correctly so that lid doesn't fall off when it's put together.

So to do that, I'm going to use a parting tool.

And I'm going to create that shoulder here.

And there's no set dimension on this.

I'm going to go for about an 1/8 of an inch.

Just knowing that that is going to be the thickness of that edge on the lid.

Now, as I mentioned before, this is end grain here.

Because this is basically a spindle blank, the grain direction is running the same way my pencil is sitting right now, I'm hollowing in to the ends of the fibers of the wood.

Now, if I was working on a bowl, my cuts would be from the outside towards the center.

That's cutting with the grain and laying those fibers down.

It makes for a much easier cut and a much cleaner cut.

But when I'm working with end grain hollowing like this, I'm actually going to hollow from the center out.

Now, I can do this with a traditional bowl gouge like this and just start from the center and kind of make those pull cuts to me.

The other thing that I can use is a carbide hollowing tool like this guy.

This has a carbide cup cutter on the end, and it's set at the right angle so that I can just set the tool rest so it's cutting right on the center height.

And then I can just make little nibbling cuts and it will just peel those fibers away.

Now the one thing that I am going to keep an eye on is because we are going to go ahead and scorch this surface, I don't want those walls to be super thin.

Instead, I'm going to leave them a little thick.

We'll do the entire outside and then I'll finish the hollowing.

So at this point, we're ready to fit the lid.

Now, fitting the lid is going to be pretty much exactly what we did here on the bottom.

But instead of having this tenon, we're going to cut a recess that's going to fit over that nice and snug.

Now this is going to be a lot of trial and error.

I'm going to make a cut, see if it fits.

It's probably going to be too tight, so we'll make another cut and see if we can get it to get on there with the right amount of friction.

What's the right amount of friction?

Well, that takes a little bit of experience, but you don't want to feel like you're going to break the lid as you put it on.

It should squeak as it goes on, but it shouldn't be so loose that it falls off when you turn the lathe on.

Now, the fit on this thing might be a little bit tighter than I want, but I think once I sand everything, it's going to be just about perfect.

So I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and pop this base off and hollow out to approximately that depth.

Alright, now the process to finish the outside of this is pretty simple.

I'm going to use a MAPP gas torch and I'm going to heat the surface up.

It's going to start to char.

I'm going to keep heating it until the surface crackles and kind of sparkles red.

The crackling is going to look a little bit like alligator skin.

You don't want to go too much past that.

And I'm going to keep turning the piece as I do that.

So I get a good consistent color all the way around.

Once it's all crackled, I'm going to go ahead and grab a wire brush, and I'm going to brush the surface and I'm going to brush it in the direction of the grain.

Otherwise it can scratch it pretty bad.

So I'm going to go with the grain, knock off all that loose carbon.

And then while this piece is still warm, I'm going to apply a mixture of oil and wax.

And because the piece is going to be warm, it's going to soak it up really quickly and it's going to give it a really nice satin sheen.

Now for the pewter inlay.

We're going to go ahead and melt pewter in a cast iron ladle.

Now pewter is available to buy online, and anything you buy online will be lead-free.

If you're reusing old pewter, you want to be careful because sometimes some of the older stuff does have lead in it.

So what I'm going to do is put the pewter inside the ladle and then start to melt it down.

Then once it's kind of coagulated into a blob in the center of this ladle, and I feel like it's melted fully, I'll go ahead and pour it into this little cavity.

Now, the block I have here was part of our initial blank.

So this is the same diameter as the lid more or less.

So after that medallion cooled, I went ahead and popped it out of this recess and cleaned that up with a parting tool just to remove any charring.

We want a good clean surface here, because now we're going to use some CA glue to stick the medallion back in place.

And that's how we're going to hold it as we turn it.

The cool thing about pewter is it's softer than our traditional turning tools are.

That means we can turn it with our standard tools.

So what I'm going to do first is use a bowl gouge just to make a draw cut to clean off the surface.

Now, as you can see, the bowl gouge leaves a pretty good finish.

Now, your best bet is to get a finish right off the tool that you're happy with and let that be your final surface.

However, if you do need to, you can wet sand this a little bit and it will clean up, alright.

But this is also a really good time to bring in specialty tools.

Something like this spiraling tool.

This allows me to add decorative spirals as I'm running the lathe.

So you can see with that spiraling tool.

I have a really nice tactile finish on that that's in a spiral.

Now the faster you go or the slower you go, it'll change how that looks, which is kind of fun.

Now another option is to use something like one of these chatter tools.

This one vibrates as it's turning.

And that adds kind of a fun little decorative bouncing spiral.

This one is a little bit more in between the spiraling tool that we just used and a chatter tool.

Now this one is going to cut a little bit less aggressively.

So it's gonna be a little bit more subtle texture.

So that one's a little bit softer and gives you a much finer look.

I'm going to go ahead and make a pull cut to go ahead and clean this off.

And I'm going to shape it slightly into a little bit of a dome.

And then I'm going to pop this entire block out of the chuck and set it on the bed of the lathe.

And then I'm going to use a ball-peen hammer to texture the surface like a hammered finish, and I think it's gonna look really cool.

There we go.

I think I really like how that texture looks.

I'm super happy with that.

So now I'm going to go ahead and mount it back in the chuck, and then I'm going to come in from the edge with my parting tool.

I'm going to cut down until I can free this out of that recess.

That might mean cutting a little bit further in to this blank that's holding it, but that's okay.

We really just want to pop it out.

Once I have that loose, I'll bring the finished box back in place.

Go ahead and mount that back in the chuck, and then tape the lid back on.

And then it's simply a matter of cutting a recess to fit this medallion and then gluing it in place before parting off the bottom of the box.

There we go.

So one of my favorite things about turning is that even if you're basing your project off of an existing one, the result can vary a little bit depending on what material you have or what decorations you do to it.

One of my least favorite things about turning is you're always left with a mess to clean up.

Making boxes allows you to play around with some ideas in the woodshop without investing a lot of time or materials on it, so you can try some different ideas.

Now the next box, and the one that I'm going to be making is going to be modeled after these two.

And while they look like books, they're actually boxes.

So if you just pull out the spine of this one, you can see that it's like a drawer.

So the box is meant to be stored flat on its side.

This book, however, is meant to just fit on a bookshelf.

And then you can pull out the spine here... ...and see the compartment for the things that you want to store on the inside.

There are deep cutouts here to be able to get at whatever you have stored inside the book.

Now, the other thing that goes along to play along with the illusion is that the pages for the insides of the book are cut to resemble like ragged edges.

That deckled edge look on some books that you'll find.

Now, one of the things that this project requires is some thin material.

So the cover boards for both of these are 1/8 inch thick.

It's not something you can find, but you can plane down your own material.

I resawed some thicker boards, and then, because our planer doesn't go all the way down to an 1/8 of an inch, I made a carrier board out of some plywood.

Then I could use some double-sided tape, put down my blank, and then send that through the planer.

After a few passes, you can work down to its final thickness.

At the table saw, I cut the pieces that I needed for the cover boards to their final length, and then while I had the miter gauge set up, I also cut the spine piece.

So what I want to do now is cut a rabbet along each edge of the spine.

That's going to accept the cover boards.

To do that, I have a rabbeting bit installed in the router table, so I just have to run one pass along each edge.

I want to route one more rabbet on the spine piece here.

This one will be on each end and will wrap around the pages part of the book.

This rabbet is a little wider, so I've removed the bearing from the bit and backed up the fence.

Now to keep the work piece square, I have a backer board here and then route the rabbet in a single pass.

The sides of the box are what look like the pages of the book.

To give it that textured, deckle-edge look to it, we're going to take advantage of the geometry of modern saw blades.

So if I raise this blade up a little bit, you can see how some of the teeth have very angled tops of the tooth.

So if I lower it back down here so just that angle is sticking up, now when I pass this blank for those sides across it, it'll create a little bit of a triangle shaped groove along the edge.

I'll make a pass along both edges, and then I can adjust the rip fence over a little bit and work my way across the piece.

Now, to increase the effect here, what I'll do is I'll raise the blade for a couple of passes, lower it back down for a few more so I can get a really uneven, kind of ragged look to just emphasize that paper-like quality.

Transforming our blanks that are textured on one face into the sides of the box happens here at the table saw also.

So what I'm going to do is miter each end of my long blank here.

Make sure that you keep the textured face up against the miter gauge fence here.

You'll see I have this one rotated at 45 degrees.

To cut the two short sides, I'm going to bring another miter gauge in that's set at 90 degrees and make that cut.

The long side is mitered on both ends.

So what I do there is I'll cut that piece deliberately long, and then just nibble off the ends until I get a nice snug fit.

We're ready for a little bit of assembly here, in that we can attach our page sides of our book to one of the covers.

I've drawn in some lines here to show that offset, because we want the pages inset just a little bit to have that overlap with the book covers.

To make this work, because we have a lot of small pieces going on here, I'm using a quick-setting glue, and what I'll do is put just a thin bead of glue down, because I really want to minimize the amount of squeeze out that I'm going to get, because inside the box here, especially as that other cover goes on, there's just not a lot of room to work.

So I'm going to put that on.

Have it just by my layout line, keeping this back edge flush.

And I'm going to be the Phil clamp here for about 15 or 20s.

Now I can repeat the process on the other side.

Then I can add this last piece.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a bead of glue on it.

And then also on the mitered edges.

Again, keep in mind we don't want to put too much on here so we can avoid squeeze out, especially on these inside corners.

Here I'm going to hold the miter joints tight and down here while the glue tacks up.

To attach the other cover, I'm going to put a thin bead of glue on the exposed sides here.

Then I'm going to turn it upright and then attach the other cover because that's going to keep the opening flush.

And then I can just center things, hold it in place for a few seconds, and then I'm going to add a few clamps.

While the box dries in clamps, I can start shaping the spine that we were working on.

Now, I want this to look as close to an old book as possible, so I've drawn an arc along the end and then some layout lines on the side, and I'm going to use a block plane, taking some swipes along here just to ease that into a nice rounded shape.

Uh, this is all going to be kind of subjective to you.

What makes it look and feel more like a book to you is really what matters.

So I'll just take passes along the side.

When I'm done with that, I'll kind of hit the corners a little bit here just to knock those down, and then I'll flip it on edge or upside down and ease the underside of this to give like a little bit of a finger relief as you pull the drawer out.

And also to mimic that crease that's in there where the book boards meet the spine.

Now, on the drawer version, the bottom rabbet is actually a little bit larger.

And that's to not only wrap around the covers of the book, but also accommodate the drawer bottom that we need to make.

Now, that drawer bottom is a piece of 1/4-inch hardboard that I just cut to size over at the table saw.

The other thing to notice here is the difference in the end rabbets.

Again, I made those at the router table with that same rabbeting bit, but on the drawer.

The end rabbets are much wider than they are on the sleeve version.

And again, that's to accommodate the parts of the drawer.

So there's going to be a drawer side that tucks into place here.

Now the two drawer sides that I need for this one, as well as the drawer back, all have rabbet along the lower edge that will capture that drawer bottom.

So with the pieces in place here for the drawer, I can assemble them.

I'm going to start by attaching the drawer sides to the spine.

I'll use a little bit of glue and then if I can tuck a little finish nailer in there, I'll hit a couple of pins in just to hold it in place.

I'll do the same thing with the drawer back.

Fit that in place, making sure that the rabbets are all lined up.

Then I can flip it upside down, put a little glue on the inside edge and drop the drawer bottom into place.

The construction of the sleeve is a little bit different in that instead of having thicker drawer sides, they're relatively thin.

I'm using 1/8-inch material here again.

Now what I want to do is on one of the sides, I'm going to make a cutout to be able to get at the contents.

Otherwise it's just kind of a deep hole in there.

So what I did is over at the workbench, laid out some center lines, and then used a circle template to draw in the route of where that cutout is going to be.

Then with a slightly smaller circle.

I created a radius on each end just to make a nice smooth transition and eliminate some sharp corners.

I'm going to use a large Forstner bit here to drill out this route.

Then I'll take this piece over to the bandsaw and cut out along the sides.

Other than the two side pieces, you're only going to need a bottom and then a back for this sleeve.

And these I cut to length over at the table saw using a miter gauge just to make a nice square cut.

We're ready for the assembly now of this part, and it goes pretty simply.

I'm going to start by taking one of the sides and then gluing it into the spine.

Again, a couple of pin nails here are a good idea.

Just to hold things in place.

Can flip that over, apply a little bit more glue and add the other side.

From there, I'll slip in the bottom, keeping that aligned flush with the bottom of the sides, and then snug right up against the spine With the construction portion of the box complete, I wanted to add a little bit of finish.

I used beech for most of the materials on here, and I wanted to make a sharper contrast between the spine and the covers of the book and those pages.

So what I did is applied a nice chocolatey brown stain onto the cover and the spine pieces to help draw out the figure in the beech, as well as create that contrast.

Now, for the most part, you can apply that stain just like you normally would.

When you get to some of the places along here where I wanted to make sure that the pages didn't get any stain on there, I used a real dry brush and then basically just rubbed it in on the edges of the cover pieces to keep that separate.

I think it turned out pretty well.

So now you can see the two formats here.

You can have the book laying down flat and make a drawer insert for it like this.

I think that's a great look and could look really nice on a mantel or on a bookshelf.

For me, though, what I wanted to do was to make the stand-up sleeve version.

If you want to build along with us, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com You'll also find the plans there for the box that Logan turned earlier, and then you can mix and match and have a whole bunch of these cranked out in a short amount of time for gifts or holidays or whatever.

Then don't forget to check out all the other plans, ideas, and techniques to help you become a better woodworker.

Then we'll gather here and we'll build more great projects in "The Woodsmith Shop."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

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...

Here at Grizzly, woodworking isn't just our business, it's our passion.

We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.