Kellogg Furniture Blog: Rosewood Stationery Box, Pt. 2

So... the insides of the box, as well as both sides of the top and bottom panels, are finished and waxed. The box is ready for glue up. One of the nice things about doing a box this size is that you can tap the dovetails home and basically be done with it, rather than fussing with clamps and cauls.

After the glue is dried, the sides are cleaned up and and planed.

At this point the box is still one closed unit. The next step is to saw apart the lid and body. I prefer to use a handsaw for this operation (as opposed to a tablesaw or bandsaw) because it leaves a much thinner kerf. This means that the grain will have less of a "jump" from one section to the other, and more importantly, I can saw through the middle one of the dovetail pins (which was intentionally cut wider than the other pins), leaving a half-pin on both sections. I make the cuts themselves very slowly, rotating the box to a new face every few strokes.

Read the complete blog entry.