I keep machine screws in this drawer
in tin cans, but they don't make very good
use of space, so I'm thinking I should make some
rectangular boxes to fit in here.
And I want to use some thin hardwood that
used to be some drawers in a cheap dresser.
But I figure I can go much thinner than that,
so I'm gonna rip these in half.
And I've already made a box to test this
and it worked out quite well.
I just resawed all these strips and I squared off
the ends and there's a few that I had to reject
because I wasn't quite in the middle for some
of them and they just came out too thin.
So, here's all my box sides cut and I wanna cut
some finger joints in it like these ones.
And that would be a crazy amount of work
if I didn't have a screw advance box joint jig.
In terms of setting up the spacings on the jig,
I figured out a long time ago that this particular
blade with a 39-tooth gear against a
12-tooth gear and 1 turn per cut
will make some very tight fitting finger joints.
Now I just need to set the blade to be
just a bit higher than the thickness of the material,
and put in my stock.
I gotta make sure all the pieces are pushed
against this fence here to keep them all aligned.
And this part here is just a sacrificial piece
to avoid tear out in the back.
Got all the fingers on one end cut.
Now I just need to offset the jig by half a turn,
rewind it, and do it again.
Now one thing that's really important is
to keep the orientations of these consistent
so that the fingers line up, which is why
marked all of the ones that were against the fence
on one end, like this. And now,
with the way I've done the offset, I know that
one end that's marked always has to meet up
with another end that's not marked.
And then they line up. When I made the
previous set of boxes, I experimented with
putting the glue on by just dipping it in the glue
but that just puts the glue on the ends of the fingers
and I actually need the glue between the fingers,
so I realize it's actually better to smear it across
the fingers like so and that gets it in there.
Maybe it's backwards, there we go.
So there's no need to clamp these because
they’re nice and tight but I do have to make
sure that they're square.
For cutting the short little pieces,
like these ones here, it gets very difficult,
because I can only cut down so far with the clamp.
And so I can't really clamp this very well.
So, instead I'm gonna use one of these clamps
but I have it configured as a spreader clamp
and I also cut a notch here,
so I can get that clamp further down so I can
clamp those pieces in place.
Now, I have to admit this clamp worked
so much better in theory than it did in
practice, I just didn't have enough holding power,
and so my pieces of wood kept slipping
from the force of the blade. So, I drilled a
hole through here, put a threaded rod in
with a nut that I can tighten against here,
and that should give me plenty of holding power.
The more boxes I put together, the faster I
get at it.
I've got a lot of boxes and now I have to
flush trim the protruding fingers on the joints.
So, I rigged this up on the table saw,
there's a rabit cut underneath this piece of wood
so that seen from the top, this edge is
exactly level with the edge of the blade.
And if I put a box against it right here,
that will trim the protrusions flush,
except I may have protrusions here
so to prevent the box from being crooked
from those protrusions, I put another piece
of wood on here.
So I've got the corners all trimmed on these things.
Lots of boxes and before I sand them,
I'm gonna make bottoms for them
and this is a good chance to use up lots of
thin scraps of plywood.
I'm trying to avoid using this part here,
because that's got a defect in it.
I deliberately oversized the bottoms so I
wouldn't have to be so careful positioning them.
And now I need to trim those flush.
I'm using the same flush trimming setup as before,
but this time I tilted the blade by 30 degrees
and that puts a nice bevel on the bottoms.
I hang the pieces over the saw blade
backwards to avoid tear-out.
Got 19 boxes all done and I also put
2 coats of varnish on the outside to make them
look nicer. The situation in my
machine screws drawer is now much improved
and even though these boxes have very thin walls,
they're quite sturdy enough to pick up
by the corners.