Cherry Covered Chocolate Be it jewels or jujubes, this elegant box is sure to please							By DON KONDRA Photos by ROGER YIP
				The design for this box was inspired by Japanese food containers and those old fashioned sliding-top pencil boxes. The resawn sides result in continuous grain all the way around the box, so choose your wood carefully with an eye for some interesting grain. Go ahead and change the dimensions of the box if you want, just make sure the blank is as long as the total length of one side and one front.
	You will need: Parts Size Quantity Top 1/2" x 3 1/4" x 10 1/4" 1 Long sides 1/2" x 2" x 10 3/4" 2
Short sides	1/2" x 2" x 3 3/4"	2
Bottom	1/4" x 3 1/4" x 10 1/4"	1
Handle	1/4" x 5/8" x 3"	1

Start with a piece of 8/4 material (in my case cherry) and resaw it into three equal thicknesses. Edge joint and surface plane. Cut the blank for the box top now, before ripping the balance of material to width. Mill the groove that holds the bottom panel before cutting the sides to length.

Because the sides are small, I cut them to length using a bandsaw and milled the mitres on my disc sander. This method eliminates the danger of working with small pieces on a tablesaw and results in less waste material--the less material you remove the better the grain match will be.

Click above to enlarge

A good trick for ensuring gap-free mitres is to make sure opposite sides are exactly the same length. After cutting and sanding the parts, stand them up on a flat surface with their outside faces together. In this position it will be easy to see if they are the same length and that the combined angle of the mitred ends is a perfect 90°.

For the bottom panel, I veneered curly cherry to 1/4" MDF but you could use store-bought ply or even adhere some decorative rice paper in keeping with the Asian-inspired design.

To assemble the box, lay the sides in line on a flat surface, inside-down, and apply three pieces of masking tape to the outside of each joint. Carefully bring the sides together in a dry run to make sure everything fits properly. Flip the taped-together assembly so the interior is facing up and use a small brush to apply glue to both sides of the joint. This is an unsupported joint so make sure it is well glued but without messy squeeze-out. The masking tape will stop the glue from squeezing onto the outside of the joints; only apply glue to within an 1/8" of the inside. Let the glue dry overnight before finish sanding the outside.

Cut the top to size then mill the rabbet with a tablesaw spinning a dado blade--the depth of the cut is half the thickness of the top, which reduces the visual mass of the top.

The final piece of the box is the handle. Start by drilling a flat-bottomed hole three-quarters of the way through the top with a 13/8"-dia. Forstner bit. Then rout the groove for the handle centred on the hole. Cut the handle now and notch each end to hide the rounded groove. I dyed the handle black to simulate ebony using aniline dye. As an alternative you could use alcohol-based non grain raising (NGR) stain. Once the dyed handle is dry, fit and hold it in place with a dab of glue. If you used cherry for the body of the box, place it in the sunlight for a few days. The exposure to sunlight will considerably speed up the cherry's natural tendency to darken. Finish the box with three coats of tung oil.
 

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