Jewelry Box - Practice Project

I made this out of three species of wood from three different continents: bamboo (Asia), walnut (N. America) and marble wood (S. America). A little side note: botanically, bamboo is a grass. Let me digress for a little bit before getting into the woodworking part. Click pictures to enlarge.

Bamboo is gaining popularity in the west in the form of bamboo flooring, cutting boards, table tops, etc. Of course, bamboo has been for hundreds of years to the present time the main source for building materials in Asia and, interestingly enough, dishes prepared with young bamboo shoots are a delicacy in many Asian culture. Even today, bamboo scaffolding is still used in construction of modern buildings in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai, etc. Bamboo has to be the perfect renewable resource because it grows fast (it has been documented to grow a foot a day during rainy season) and grows year round in the tropics. Its grain is straight and tight and modern manufacturing method has produced very stable, consistent material that makes it ideal to work with. Bamboo slats are commonly an eighth of an inch thick and rarely exceeds a quarter inch but when laminated it is a very strong material that hardly expand or contract with humidity. I think I will have a page dedicated to bamboo at a later time.

This was a practice project because I haven't done a jewelry box before although I would describe this as "sort of" jewelry box. And you will soon see why. A friend of mine gave me a few pieces of left over material from when he replaced his carpet with bamboo flooring. Bamboo floors are not veneers - they are solid, albeit laminated pieces.

The other interesting feature of this project is how I re-enforced the corners. When a box is constructed with mitered joints, the 90 degree corners are the weakest points. There are a few ways to strengthen those corners (like wedges and glue blocks from the inside corners) but I came up with an innovative way that makes for far stronger support and yet aesthetically pleasing.

The four bamboo sides were mitered and glued together with each side grooved a quarter inch for the top and bottom boards. Then at the table saw I ripped the box into two pieces - one top and one bottom. By so doing the two pieces will book-match perfectly. ( See Jewelry Box Project 2 for a more detailed method).

This type of solid brass hardware is not typically used as a clasp but I found a way to make it work.

After the glue has dried I cut the four jointed sides at the router table, as shown below to receive the walnut re-enforcements that were later glued and clamped.

While marble wood and bamboo are two unrelated species, their end grains look too similar. Marble wood's plain sawn side just simply looks exquisite. I glued together three pieces to make the top of the box.

Not jewelry but it is a jewel of a tool, one of my favorites - the Veritas shoulder plane.