Photos will never do justice the amount of movement you get or the depth of the figure in this Maple.

This is a 4' long 10" wide piece of 4/4 (actually 1 1/8") luthier grade figured Maple I came across while buying some other lumber from a fellow woodworker who was getting out of the hobby. He said he had been sitting on this piece for around 25 years and just couldn't bring himself to cut it up. It was truly stunning, and while I did pay for the other lumber he gave me this piece as a gift.

Why is it that the part you want to use is never on the end of the board? It's always right in the middle of the board.

Well, here goes nothing.

Cleaning up the face with a hand plane really shows just how much chatoiance is in this board.

Squaring one edge for resawing

The Laguna 14-Twelve had no problems resawing this wide of a cut

The resaw cut was made at 3/8" and after cleaning up the faces it came out to 5/16" and left me plenty more of this beautiful grain in the off-cut for another project. The off-cut piece is thick enough to resaw again and make a nice bookmatch for something like a door panel.

I really like the tight straight grain of this African Padauk to go with the Maple. 

I cut the maple into three pieces for the front, lid, and back panels. The bottom panel will be 3/8" Baltic Birch plywood and will be glued in place to give the box a 1/8" lift. The exposed plywood edge will be blackened with Arm-R-Seal gel stain.

This is my set-up for a tail vise.

Cutting rabbets

I used a cross-cut saw to establish the endgrain rabbets

The waste is popped off with a chisel.

A router plane is used to maintain consistency.

Cross-cut sleds aren't just for the tablesaw.

Now that the pieces are seperated the last two rabbets are cut.

The lid and bottom panels can now be fitted.

Time for glue and clamps.

The lid is now taped in place and tape is added to the ends to assist in marking out the hole locations for the brass pins.

Once the holes are cut the tape is removed.

This pin location will allow the pin to work as a hinge for the lid. It was critical to remember not to drill all the way through the hole location at the front of the lid. A dummy pin will go in that location for aesthetics.

The pins were cut a little longer than needed.

The inside corner of the lid panel is rounded over to allow the lid to open.

It is adjusted until the lid opens just past 90 degrees.

the other pins are glued in place with CA glue.

They can now be filed flush.

This is the codition the box sat in for the next two years

Once I stopped feeling sorry for myself and kicked myself back into gear I got out the smoothing plane and flushed up all sides of this box. The end panels were done on sandpaper glued to glass because of the brass pins.

I have another box project that you will see later that I used this 1/8" x 1/8" Ebony banding on all of the corners.

I just grabbed a piece of scrap and cut to an appropriate length. I don't know the legth, I just eyeballed it. I used the sandpaper on glass to smooth the edges and round the ends.

The thumb lift is glued in place with Tite-bond hide glue.

Card scrapers and sanding blocks are used for final finish prep and softening of the edges and corners.

Three coats of Arm-R-Seal Satin topcoat with 24 hours and a light 400 grit sanding between coats.

Three days after the final coat I applied Alfie Shine Hard Wax Polish and buffed it out with a shoe shine brush.

While the box was curing I took a trip to Tandy Leather and picked up a nice piece of black pig skin suede for the interior of the box.

Thanks for following along I hope you enjoyed it.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I'll be happy to answer as best I can.

-Tim McCoy

Timmy2Hands