A couple of quick gifts

I’m working on a desk right now which will be posted when its done, but I took a short break from that to do a couple of quick Christmas presents. Minimal photography here, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. The wood all came from raiding my scrap bin.

Buying a bottle of someone’s favorite booze is a great start to a gift, but how about putting it in a custom box? That raises things to the next level.

This box is pretty simple: just mitered corners, with all the sides and bottom made from 1/2″ Peruvian walnut. The bottom is rabbeted in but unglued to allow for movement. The rest for the neck of the bottle is a thicker scrap of walnut and the depression for the neck is made with a Forstner bit.

The lid features some leftover leopardwood, which has been in the shop for a couple of years. This gave me a little trouble because it’s been sitting in the scrap bin for quite a while and had developed a nasty amount of cupping. I sprayed it down with water and clamped it flat to the table, and waiting about 48 hours before unclamping it. That got most of the bow out and I was able to use the result as my lid. Once I fitted the trim piece to the bottom edge and added a piece to press against to open it, but box was looking good.

I’ve noticed a lot of YouTube woodworkers make planer shavings to cushion the bottle, though I didn’t know why. But I tossed a scrap of hard maple in the vice and took enough shavings to fill in the voids between bottle and box, and in the process I saw why we do this — planer shavings absorb shocks and bounce back, much like those really annoying Styrofoam peanuts we all hate, but without the mess or static.

Even quicker and easier (which is good for doing things on December 22) were these clocks. Well, really, they are tabletop clock stands — the clock is self-contained and simply presses into a hole bored into the top.

These were almost purely a CNC project; I’m trying to get better with the CNC to get my money’s worth out of it. So the front the curved sides were made on the CNC and glued together with a 1/4″ bottom cut on the tablesaw and bandsaw. The hole is also bored by the CNC, so the only hand work here was cutting the bottom and making a 15-degree bevel cut on the bottom edge to make it lean back. I used a block plane to put a wide decorative chamfer on the bottom at the back and sanded it all.

These only took about 3 hours total to cut, sand, shape the bottom, glue together, and finish. Admittedly I used Titebond Speed Set on these to cut that time a little, and a hard wax oil finish.

This is simple piece to produce in quantity, and the clock parts are around $10 depending on how fancy you want the face to be. It’s a great way to use up small scraps.

Now, back to the desk.