Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Turning a pill box—pt. 2

Published on September 18, 2011 in Woodturning. Closed

Starting the lid

Again I apologize for the delay between posts. Our little start-up company is just porting its software to production servers, and some things are breaking in the process. We’re spending a lot of time testing and talking to the programmers. Our beta test is coming up!

Anyway, I parted the base off the blank and removed the remaining piece from the chuck. I had turned a tenon on the end of the blank which would become the top before parting it off, so it was a simple matter to grip it in the chuck and hollow the top out. The only precision required was in getting a nice suction fit to the base.

I used a digital caliper to measure the little rabbeted ridge on the top of the base, then turned the lid to that diameter. Using a side-cutting scraper, I carefully removed a few thousandths of an inch at a time of wood until I had a tight fit.

Lid holds the base

Since I had a good fit to the base, I could use the lid as a jam chuck to turn the outside of the box and contour the bottom. I tapped the base onto the lid, then turned. Afterward, I sanded and finished the outside of the box and set the base aside.

The next step was to cut the tenon off the top. I removed the lid and put the waste block back in the chuck. Then I turned a rabbet so the lid would fit onto it, making another jam chuck.

Finishing the lid

I didn’t have quite as tight a fit as I would have liked, I wanted to use the tailstock to hold things together. I ran it up to push on the tenon, then turned almost all of the tenon away with a spindle gouge. When there was just a tiny piece remaining, I removed the tailstock and carefully trimmed the last bit off while holding the lid on with my hand. Then I sanded and finished it.

Finished box

That’s it—thanks to the magic of jam chucks. That’s what people used in the days before woodworking chucks, and they were a great solution here.

Turning a pill box — pt. 1

Published on September 6, 2011 in Woodturning. Closed Tags: .
Turned box
The finished, turned box

Little boxes are quick and easy to make, but they offer some interesting challenges in the work holding department. Here’s how to turn one.

This box is about 1.5″ in diameter, so I started with a scrap of mahogany a little larger than that, and longer than needed. I mounted it on the lathe between centers and turned it round.

Rooughout with tenons
Rooughout with tenons

Here I’ve grabbed a Stebb drive center in the jaws of a chuck so I didn’t have to unscrew the chuck, then screw it back on later. I get a little runout (off-centeredness) this way, but not enough to make any difference with this kind of turning. (I wouldn’t do if for a competition top, however). Once I turned the blank round, I cut a tenon on each end.

Parting off the lid

Parting off the lid

With tenons cut, I could put away the Stebb center and grab the piece in a chuck—a necessity for hollowing out the insides of the box. The tenon gives me something to grab onto, and the tenon shoulder serves as an accurate reference against the top of the jaws. This latter part is critical. If I just grabbed the rough blank in the chuck without referencing the shoulders, it would almost certainly move under the stress of turning. And when I unchucked one end and grabbed the other, the two turning axes would almost certainly not line up. An extra minute now saves endless headache later (a lot like the rest of life, I think).

I wanted to preserve the grain match where the top and bottom would come together, so I used my narrowest parting tool—a 1/16″ Chris Stott design (rather like this one), to cut a fine kerf at the dividing line. Here you see it almost cut through.

The box base

The box base

The last steps before unmounting this piece were to hollow the inside to a depth of about 3/8″, and to turn a lip on the edge, so the top of the box would have something to grab. An easy way to hollow end-grain boxes such as this is to use Soren Berger’s Berger tool, which he designed for just such work. After turning, I sanded the inside and finished it with friction polish.

Next time—turning the top, and then the tricky part of blending them together.