Generally speaking, I feel more at home with a brad nailer in my hand than any other power tool. So when the old man suggested I make some small boxes for the relatives at Christmas like the cheap ones you might find in a store, I thought, “How bad can it be?” The answer, of course, was worse than I thought.
If you’ve ever seen balsa wood boxes at the local hobby shop and thought “I can do that,” the answer is of course, yes; yes you can. I patterned my version from those very little boxes, and after 2 hours wished to hell I hadn’t. For some reason, building a seven-foot bookcase seems easier than a little 4″ x 4″ wooden box.
I couldn’t use the brads or fasteners that I had, so lots of clamping was involved. That is, until I got smart enough to start using super glue. That, of course, was admittedly not until I got the entire bottom part together. The lid assembly went much faster. The cutout was hell until I figured out a heavy wood rasp would make shaping much faster once the form was roughed in the top.
At the stage when this photo was taken, the lid still needed to be fine-sanded around the cutout and the liner for the box was cut, but not applied.
It’s a fine art that I still need to improve upon significantly. But for the near future, if I need nice, small boxes, I’ll buy them for $2 a pop at the local craft store. Just sayin’.