Cabinet Scrapers are Awesome!

Nothing Like It

     Although most of my time has been spent working on the dovetails for the Maple Splendor box I needed a break from the exacting work so am playing around with some of the Brazilian Satinwood and the Macacauba.  Maybe it's corny but I'm going to do a series of boxes and title them "A River Runs Through It".  They will feature some free form bandsaw work on the tops reminiscent of a river or stream running between it's banks.  These will be smaller sized boxes that will be decorative and functional.  Smoothing out the irregularities and removing the Gorilla Glue was easy work with my freshly burnished cabinet scraper.  Here's another shot:

     It's pretty amazing how the shavings even stay together where the two woods are joined!

     Once the rest of the box was resawn and mitered the shooting board was used to make them the exact same width.  Here's something I should have shown at the demonstration I gave at the Sin City Woodworkers last Wednesday; how to insure that each piece is the same width.  That's done by clamping a stop block to the fence as shown here:

Use of the Stop Block

     Here's what it looks like from a different point of view:

Stop Block

     When I made this shooting board I considered making a more sophisticated stop block arrangement but this works just fine.  Quite often, simple is better.  It got too hot in the shop and besides it's time to call it a night.  Tomorrow I'll continue work on the slanted dovetail box plus fit the bottom to these boxes and assemble them using packaging tape.  Needs to be done when it's as cool as possible but since these are so small I'll more than likely assemble them on the kitchen island in the air conditioned house!