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.

Many years ago my Uncle was cleaning out his extra wood inventory. He always called me for that. As a cabinet maker you kind of develop a strange affection for wood. You end up with lots of scraps but they are pretty scraps and you can't seem to bring yourself to throw them away or burn them. So he would call me up and say " Hey I bet could use some wood" and I always took the stuff. After loading my truck with highly figured wood scraps he came out and handed me a few pieces of cherry. " Don't forget these" , he said, " they will make great spoons" Well Uncle Mark didn't really care what they where used for so long as they where no longer at his house taking up space. I never did make them into spoons. But I did remember his advice and took up the practice of spoon making. Not regularly but whenever I got caught in a sort of limbo. Like between trips to pick up the kids, or while waiting for baseball practice to get over, or while waiting for a call from someone or other... you get the idea. Lately as I have been caught in limbo more and more often, I have spent a lot of time carving spoons. I started to look on the ground when I walk thru the woods for interesting pieces. Some seem to beg me to pick them up and carve them. This is how I discovered the magic that lies within roots. Roots are special, they are twisted in wonderfully interesting ways. Even better is the way they like to separate when cut, they are exceptionally well behaved and very often seem to be begging to be spoons. I don't know if selling spoons will ever yield me a decent wage but I do enjoy making them. If you would like to see my work you are most welcome to visit snazzybox.com

You know I always wondered why when a person goes into a jewelry store and buys an expensive piece of jewelry it almost always comes in a card board box. Sure they snaz them up sometimes with cloth or colored cardboard linings so you get a sort of classy looking cardboard box. But lets face it this box is not a snazzybox its just a piece of cardboard. Ok sure so maybe Im not an expert on jewelry boxes. It is duely noted by the people closest to me that I do not purchase and give out high volumes of jewelry on a regular bases. I guess thats all the more reason for me to be confused by the issue. I don't know about you but if I was going to shell out a wad of cash for a piece of jewelry I'd want the thing to come in something a little more snazzy than a cardboard box. It's not as if I actually put a whole lot of energy and effort into researching the subject of jewelry boxes, but as a casual observer the few boxes I have seen made out of actual wood, where nothing more than vaneer glued together using tiny glue blocks. For those of you who aren't experts on all this "highly" technical nonsense on wood working stuff, this is all code for cheaply made crap. So in summary my boxes are way cooler and I think I will make some other boxes out of nice pieces of highly figured wood and offer them up for sale. Snazzybox.com