I'm a member of the Guild of New Hampshire Woodworkers, which offers various sub-groups for people's various interests - Beginners/Intermediates, Luthiers, Woodturners, etc. I'm a fledgling member of the Period Furniture group, dedicated to pre-industrial revolution furniture.

Our project for the year is to build a one-drawer table in the federal style (can't imagine where we got the idea.) I've never done any kind of embellishments, stringing, banding, or inlay, so this is going to be a great learning experience. But I don't want to just dive in and learn to inlay on my federal table, right from the start.

So I need a smaller project to start inlaying - something to learn the techniques. Like maybe a box or something.

I know from experience that I'll accomplish nothing if I just set out to practice on a board. If it's a throw-away then I'll do throw-away work and not really learn any skills. It has to be something worthwhile, something worth keeping or giving as a valued gift, yet small enough so the main part will be the decoration.

Here's what I'm looking at....




I found this on an auction site. It's about 6 to 8 inches long and maybe 4 inches in height and depth. Tea was a precious commodity and as such would have been kept under lock and key. While I may not make mine quite as fancy as this one, it is a good place to start. We'll see....

NHGW Period Group is a great group. I think this is a great project and a lot of fun. Just don't hesitate and go full speed ahead. If you think too much then you will stretch your skill level. Please feel free to share and ask questions. We as Major League Woodworking love to help and see you have fun working with your hands.

Fred

Thank you, Freddy.

Now on to the joinery. The sample above appears to have butt joints covered with veneer. I'd like to get into veneering, but maybe small steps is a better way. So I'm thinking of doing it in mahogany, simply inlaying the mahogany without veneering it. I can start veneering on a later project.

So that means dovetails or miter joints. None of the examples I've seen have had visible dovetails - the ones not veneered have had mitered joints - so I'm thinking of locking miter joints. There's another reason for this below.

Now the plot thickens. Below is an image of a Chippendale style tea caddy with a secret compartment!



The box is about 10 inches by 6 by 6. You're looking at the right end, where an outer panel slides up to reveal a hidden drawer which would probably have held a silver tea spoon. I think the drawer takes up a lot of room, making it fairly obvious that there's a false bottom to this caddy. Maybe I'll just do the compartment, big enough for a spoon (or some documents), but without the drawer. That will take less space away from the main part of the container, but the spoon will rattle. With a drawer I can nest the spoon to hold it firmly.

With lock miter joints I hope to be able to have an inner liner dadoed into the front and back panels, to act as the structural right end of the box, allowing the outer panel to slide up in its track to reveal the lower compartment. An alternative would be to simply slide out the outer bottom panel, which wouldn't require moving the side panel. Simpler, but less elegant.

Discussion, please....

1. To veneer or not to veneer?
2. Sliding side panel or sliding bottom? Or leave off the secret compartment and just concentrate on the box itself?

The project is going along nicely. First step was to build a "proof of concept" model to verify the lock miter joinery would work, ie. that the sliding side would slide properly. This was built of poplar. The poplar photographs more clearly than the mahogany, making the joinery easier to see.

The box is simply dry-fitted at this point. The poplar is soft enough that the joints hold together on their own. Note - there is a 1/8" inner side panel dadoed into the front and back. This inner panel is the real end of the box, and holds the box together while the outer panel slides up and down.

For those of you who haven't used lock miters, above is a closeup of the lock-miter joints (sorry, that's as close as my camera will focus). They are nice because the outside looks like a normal miter joint, but as you can see the two pieces lock to each other so you don't need any splines or biscuits to reinforce the joint. Really a nice system requiring only a single specialized router bit for your router table.

Setup of the router bit to cut these is a bit touchy - you have to get the bit height and distance from the fence very precisely - but with some help from an article Bruce Wedlock wrote in our guild journal, it really went fairly easily. One piece goes through the router flat, the other piece goes on edge, all without changing the setup between pieces.

Below is the sliding side panel revealing the hidden drawer.

The actual bottom and the false bottom above the drawer are both milled to 1/8". I already mentioned the left side inner panel; the one on the right is only for symmetry. Lines are roughed out along the top edges of the box where it will eventually be rabbeted to contain the lid. Again, this is just dry-fitted so the joints aren't tight right now.

Now the real box, in African mahogany (khaya).

The top is rabbeted into the sides and the seams will eventually be covered with banding. The mahogany box is taller than the mock-up after I saw that the drawer took up enough space to make the caddy look too shallow on the inside. Unlike the poplar, which holds itself together due to the friction of the fibers, the smooth mahogany needs tape to hold it together until it's glued.

Next step will be to put the inlays on the front and top, and install the banding and stringing. Doing it before the box is glued up allows me to replace any pieces that I may screw up in the inlaying. This will be my first time inlaying and I'm really hoping I can get a presentable box on the first try.

Then the box will be glued up and the lid cut off. Finally I'll add the banding that hides the seams around the top edge, which can't be done until the box is glued up.

Now for the inlaying....

Kent,

I appreciated the high quality of your post. Good pictures and excellent explainations. By the way, nice prototype box too.

Bruce

Kent,
Very nice. Good picture animation. Don't toss your prototype. Use that to experiment with laying up the veneer.

Kent,

Have you made any more progress on this box? How is the inlay work going or are you there yet?

I'm now on my third fan. The first two came out well until I tried to put on the black fingernails, and therein lay the problems.

Lesson One
Tommy and Eli suggest mounting the holly fans on one piece of backing, cutting the semicircles in the ends of the fans, then mounting it on a second piece of backing. That means mounting your black toenails down on a lower level than the holly fan blades - I guess this was because their black veneer was substantially thicker than the holly.

My black is only 1/40 thick, so I glued two sheets together to double it to 1/20. That's a little thicker than the 1/32 holly, but if I mounted it on the second backer it would still be well below the top of the holly.

So I decided to use only one backer and mount both the fan blades and the toenails on it. That means I had to use the round gouge on the fan blades while they were still on the veneer paper, and before mounting them on the backer. This went well. I cut out the ends of the fans and glued them onto the backer.

Lesson Two
Tommy and Eli suggested using the 5-20 gouge to make the ends of the fans. The podcast said that an 8-20 with a deeper curve would look better, but since we had already bought the 5-20 for the bellflowers we didn't have to spend the money if we didn't already own the second gouge.

Well, the problem is that the black toenails are really very shallow that way, and therefore very fragile. After I glued them on and tried to cut out the full ellipse, they were so small that several just shattered and several didn't stay glued onto the backer.

So I went out and bought a brand new 8-20 gouge. MUCH BETTER. With the deeper curve, the ends of the fan blades look much nicer, and it will make my toenails wider so they'll glue better. I know it might not appear so on the image here, but the 8-20's are really a lot more dramatic looking.

I'll post again when I get the toenails attached and cut out the ellipse - hopefully toenailus intactus. I've gotta admit I'm a bit nervous about cutting it out after the last experience. I don't know if I'd be better off trimming it with a knife, or taking it to the scroll saw - those toenails are really quite fragile.

Glad to see your progress thru the fan. How did you cut the fan segments and did you have any problems with the shading? Love the your drawing and how you explained your lessons approach.

The fans went well. I did just like the podcast said - cut out rectangles and sand shaded them diagonally then made the shooting jigs and cut the fans out. I used the shooting jigs to draw a line along the edge of the shooting jig on the back of the rectangle, then cut the fan with an Exacto and a metal ruler. Then I put the blades back into the jig and shot them with my low-angle block plane.

Because my fans are smaller, I reduced the number to 4 blades per quadrant. Otherwise the blades would have been just too teeny.

The nice thing about those jigs is that they work for any size fan. For my small box, my ellipses are only 3" x 2" but they work fine in the jigs (which were sized for larger ellipses). I made my rectangles larger than needed for the rays, but still small enough to fit on the jig. This gave me more shaded area than I needed. Then I placed the rectangle on the jig in a position to use the nicest part of the shading for the ray - the rectangle doesn't have to butt up against the stop block of the jig.

Below you can see how I chose the nicest part of the shading and lined that up on the jig. I'll still get about a 2" long wedge and for my small ellipse I only need about the first 1" of that.

I used fairly coarse sand - swimming pool filter sand - because I already had it, and it worked out fine. I don't think fineness of sand is critical, but if you have to buy some anyway you might as well get the finest you can. Reptile sand at PetCo is a lot finer. There is technique in how deep to stick the piece into the sand, and when to take it out. I also think that if you keep it not too hot, it browns more slowly and gives you more latitude in shading it just right.

Great posts Kent. Nice to see your techniques and seeing what works and doesn't work. Keep it going. This is going to be an outstanding box. Cal

cool...i am glad the podcasts were helpful...they were meant only as a guide. ..this is why i love the 207 and woodworking in general...with so many members comes just as many ways to get the same result...the 8-20 works much better and since those podcasts were just a guide to the forum 10 we didnt do a real how 2 ..but good enough..3 years later we still see guys like you at least trying new techniques..
great job man...

Tommy,
The podcasts get us "off top dead center" by showing us that it can be done, and by any normal craftsman. They convince us to get out and try it, just like you say. And then the 207 provides the moral support we sometimes need when trying something new.

But... no amount of podcasting is ever going to get me to try a bombe' anything. Ain't gonna happen

Great Job Kent. The Fans came out GRREATT. As Tony The Tiger would say.

Fr

Thanks for sharing.

So now it's time to actually apply the toenails. I had trouble with them coming off on the first attempt, so these are wider to give more glue area. The downside to this is that there's a lot more work in aligning them. The tiny toenails that Eli made in the podcast require a lot less fitting than my bigger toenails. As I get more practice maybe I'll be able to move to smaller toenails.
I found it easier to work this way. Do two or three on one side, then clamp them to the bench while I work on the other side for a while. The 3 or 4 minutes it takes to glue the second side allows the first to firm up. Then I clamp the second side and go back to the first.

These toenails are a real pain in the butt. And to think I can BUY these shaded fans for about $6 from several sources!

So here are my two fans with all the toenails installed.
Next I used my elliptical pattern to pencil a line around the edge of the two completed assemblies. I decided to use the scroll saw to cut them out - which I heartily recommend if you have one. I taped down a piece of 1/4" plywood for a zero-clearance setup and cut out the fans.

Now the stringing. I'm using white glue because it dries transparent. Yeah, I know, I'll be scraping off the top surface in the end, so the squeezeout should all be scraped away, but I just like it better that way.

I put packing tape on a soft pine board (so I don't glue the whole thing to the pine board) then stuck the paterae down with carpet tape. The podcast said to clamp them down, but it looked like the clamp would be getting in the way, and the carpet tape worked out fine.

Next I dampened the stringing with white glue and pre-curled it by pulling it over a straightedge, just like we used to do with construction paper curls in grade school. Then I wrapped the glue-dampened stringing around the patera and fastened it with push pins.

After they dried, a little sanding around the edges and the two paterae are ready to go. Below I wiped down my mahogany with mineral spirits to bring out the color it will have when finished. Then I wiped down the paterae and set them on the mahogany to check the look - on the finished box one of them will be on the lid, the other on the front.
You can see my black banding is wider than Eli's, again because of my bad first experience with the toenails. I think his thinner banding definitely looks finer... but that's what this box is for, to play with the technique and see how it works. Now I have a lot more confidence in the technique, so when I make my fans for the federal table, I'll cut closer to the points to get a thinner black line. Yes, I will make them. No, I will not buy any fans. No, I will not buy any fans. No, I will not buy any fans.

But in the meantime, next installment of the tea caddy - routing out the cavity and fitting the paterae....

Kent,
Ive never tried to make a shaded fan. This can't be your first attempt. You are making it look way to easy. Keep those post's coming.

Rat.

Well, the tea caddy is essentially finished. A few more coats of wipe-on varnish and installing the hinges and it'll be done. More on the hinges below...

Now the gory details...
Routing out the cavities for the paterae went well. I stuck the fans in their appointed places with double-stick tape and traced around them with an Exacto. Then I routed the cavity using a Dremel with the plunge router base from Stew-Mac, which I highly recommend. I had a 1/4" straight router bit on it and routed to just inside the line, then cleaned it up with the Exacto and a small chisel. It fit nice and tight!

The banding went almost as well, routing out the channel on my router table with a 5/16 straight bit to match my 5/16 wide banding. I glued it in with white glue so any gaps that filled with glue would dry transparent rather than yellow.

I mitered the ends with the mini-miter box shown above and my Japanese pull-saw. The problem is that no matter how I arranged and cut the binding, I couldn't get all 4 corners to match in a way they looked good. I think part of my problem is in the design of the binding - something I'll take into account when I plan my next project with banding. I think the simple alternating squares would be easier to match in the corners.

There are also a few minor gaps around the banding, slips of the chisel during cleanup of the corners, but they should fill in with finish, and are not really that visible.

Lessons Learned
Staining-
I wanted the wood to look darker than natural khaya, and I wanted to fill in the grain. So I used a nice TransTint mahogany dye rubbed in with linseed oil and rottenstone. Naturally I dyed and filled it before I installed the banding and the fans, so the dye wouldn't get on the decorations, and the color looked just right.

Fine. But I found that when I got to leveling and smoothing the fans, and especially the banding, I found it required enough scraping and sanding that much of the dye was scraped off the surface of the mahogany. Next time I'll dye it a little darker than I want it to end up, so it can be lightened a bit by scraping and sanding. (On retrospect, I may have put a light sealcoat of shellac on it before I dyed the wood, which would, of course, have kept the dye from sinking in deep enough.)

I'm still thinking of darkening it with a coat or two of tinted finish. Yes, it would darken the banding and fans also, and obscure a bit of the grain, but the real antiques all have a nice patina that darkens and dulls the contrast anyway. So, I'm still thinking about that option. A lesson learned.

Escutcheon Who?
Now the big problem, and the reason why I haven't attached the hinges yet. If you look at the front of the box, you'll see that I neglected to leave any space for the lock! The escutcheon would have to overlap part of my precious shaded fan!

SWAMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) tells me that I should have placed the paterae horizontally, which would have looked better and would have left more room for the lock. But I've gotta say that EVERY example I've ever seen of a shaded fan has been vertically oriented, so that's why I placed them that way. I went for centering the fan where it would look best, without thinking of the lock.

Now a real tea caddy would always have had a lock. Tea was too precious to tempt your servants or visitors with an unlocked tea caddy. So this will take some thought...

I Photoshopped in an escutcheon for the smallest lock I could find, and it really doesn't look that obtrusive. So I think I'll order that lock and escutcheon from Lee Valley and install it. It would have been nice if the fan was a little lower on the box, but it isn't fatal.

All in all, this box been a GREAT learning experience. I now have the confidence to go ahead and start the federal table with the knowledge that I can properly decorate it. I might even try another type of medallion, like a shaded shell motif. I'll give you a blow-by-blow account of the project.

My vote is to leave it as-is. Yes, it's historically correct to have a lock on it, but in my opinion that's not everything. The learning experience was to leave room the next time, so I'd just call this box done when you've put the last coat of finish on it rather than hacking into your nice sand-shaded fan.

Kent,

The box turned out great! Don't sweat the lock.... Thanks for posting.

Whit

Turned out great! Nice work Kent,
Chris

Kent,

Did you make the banding as well? Great Job!!!

FR

Awesome job. I'm becoming a fan of the Federal period.

Kent,
The box looks fantastic,

I have a suggestion for the locks. Why not put 2 of them. That way you can have one on the left and one on the right of the fan.

good job...as far as a lock goes....you built this tho learn fed stuff...you accomplished that!! now...make a project that has hardware and other embellishments...how about a sideboard?