Auctiva Emporium: nhwoodcraft

I used to do a lot of furniture repair. My parents had an antiques shop and my dad would always buy pieces in disrepair and show up at my shop to unload his truck. Fixing up old stuff requires you have a whole lot of old wood lying around so you can patch the stuff without making the patch stand out like a sore thumb. The thing about scraps is they breed more scraps, and those make more and so on and so forth. One day I went to use my bandsaw to cut out a backsplash for an old commode and found myself standing on a pile of wood scraps. It occured to me I should clean it up so I began the task. Now I always have trouble cleaning up wood scraps. The thing that happens is I pick up the piece of wood and look at it and if it has a nice grain pattern I don't want to throw it out or burn it. So it ends up in a box with other scraps. Well I had read a lot of books and magazines on wood working and found a nifty article on making puzzle boxes. So I set about making some. I went thru a lot of saw blades. The trouble with bandsaws is they dont make good blades for cutting a tight radius in thick wood. It takes a lot of practice to cut thru a hard piece of maple with a 1/8 inch blade especially when that piece of maple is 3 or 4 inches thick. But I managed a batch of 30 or so and only broke about 6 blades. I gave these boxes out as gifts, and before I knew it a few of the folks I gave them to wanted to buy a dozen or more. So of course I obliged. I have been making them ever since. These boxes are great fun to make and even more fun to watch other people handle. There are no real planned cuts on these things, I just follow some basic rules and end up with a great box almost every time. I made quite a few changes to the design that I began from. Most puzzle boxes of this kind have one track in the middle that the top slides on. This makes for a pretty unstable box since the middle gets cut out and there is nothing to support that little puzzle shaped piece. So I use two, one on each end and dont hollow out that part, ever since I started doing that they held together nicely and don't ever break unless I am using unstable material to begin with. Over time I have expirimented with different ways of shaping the box. My work still progresses and perhaps in time my boxes will evolve into a different form but until then I will keep making more like these and having fun doing it. You can look at my boxes at Snazzybox.com.