A Box Full of Tears

The lady on this box feels my pain.

This box has been a work in progress for awhile now. Mostly because when I start working on it it drives me to uncontrollable bouts of crying. Not real tears of course, I'm talking about the ones you cry on the inside when you know you're going to have hours upon hours of tedious work ahead of you. The idea for this box came from the frustration of having to dig around a huge tool box for replacement blades for my x-acto knives. So I had the brilliant idea to carve a box to store my blades and small hand tools.

 My work usually has some used wooden pallets that no one is using anymore and I'm more that happy to lug them back to the apartment for materials. (Free wood is free wood.) So as pictured on the right,  I took the bottom part of the pallet and cut them down to three even pieces. I then sanded them down and marked which way the grain was moving on each piece. After arranging the segments so the grain was going the same direction I used wood glue to join the segments and held them in place with clamps. I had to let it sit for a week like this to make sure it held. I then added the third segment and waited another week. After all this waiting I took a plane and shaved away the uneven spots then sanded it down with my hand sander. The top of the box is two pieces of wood glued to together like the bottom three. Tomorrow I'll post pictures on how I plan to hollow out the bottom section to the appropriate depth needed for my tools.