Practicing what I preach, I took a few hours off this weekend and hand-prepared some leftover pine paneling for joinery.

Pine paneling off-cuts from my cousin Gary are my main source of casual dovetailing stock.

I forget sometimes what a joy to work generic pine can be.  Fluffy, flat-sawn white pine planes nicely, saws easily, shoots smoothly and produces the tightest dovetails I’m capable of cutting (mostly through fiber compression).  And any slight cup in the boards definitely presses right out when the dovetails close.

Apparently the lighting makes the pencil marks look like terrible gaps.

The above box is about 18″ x 12″ and will probably serve no real purpose.  It’s not the right shape for a bench top chisel case and much too small for any meaningful toolbox, so I will probably just glue and nail it to a base and give it to someone for use as a junk tray (for recent mail and receipts and such).

Even I’m allowed a “look at this thing I made” post once in a while.

I haven’t yet prepared the base, but I’ve got about 24 board feet of select pine for an eventual tool-chest project from which I can borrow when I get some time next weekend. I also need to smoothing plane off the pencil marks and flush the joints, but I’ll get to that next weekend as well.

Come to think of it, I’m going to the Mets game on April 19 (a Matt Harvey start, weather permitting), so maybe it will be the weekend after next.

JPG