Category: diy

I made a small, wood­en box using fin­ger joints to store my resis­tors used for elec­tron­ics projects.

I’ve been hop­ing to prac­tice using box joints for quite a while. My sand­ing acci­dent back at the end of 2019 was in try­ing to make a box joint jig for the table saw sled. When I final­ly did make that, the results weren’t great. So I decid­ed to pur­chase a com­mer­cial box joint jig for a router table from Rock­ler. After a quick test, I also pur­chased some longer, straight cut bits. 

The first step was to use my (new!) table saw to cut the 1/2” ply­wood pieces. I also cut the slot in each side to accom­mo­date the 1/4” ply­wood bot­tom. I’m not sure this last step wasn’t a mis­take in my order of oper­a­tions, though. I end­ed up get­ting some real­ly bad treat out from the router on that lit­tle strip of wood on two of the sides. I do think now that a spi­ral down-cut bit may also help with this. 

So, this box joint jig is intend­ed for a router table. A router table, in brief is used to mount a router upside down below. This then allows you to bring the work­piece to the tool, rather than tak­ing the router to the piece. This is essen­tial in small­er pieces and for many jigs. Now, my router “table” is just a piece of 3/4” MDF scrap I clamp to my work­bench. I can then clamp the jig to that. I used a few more scrap pieces to clamp the shop vac hose as dust extrac­tion. I did sev­er­al test cuts on some scrap to “dial in” the fin­ger width to get a good fit. 

After the pieces were cut, I had some repair to do. While ply­wood is a great mate­r­i­al, it’s not the best choice for this par­tic­u­lar method of cut­ting box joints. There was a lot of tear-out. I was able to use some glue & saw­dust to fix some of these before fly­ing up the box. Glue up for box joints isn’t hard, but I could see if being dif­fi­cult on a large piece with all those fin­gers. But it’s at least easy to keep things square. 

Once the glue cured, it was time to sand down the fin­gers flush to the box faces. Here again, ply­wood isn’t very for­giv­ing. The thin face veneer sands away quick­ly on the disc sander. Next it was time for wood filler. Those slots left 1/4” holes in each cor­ner. And the ply­wood tear out had numer­ous gaps. So I went a lit­tle crazy with the wood filler. This then left me with anoth­er round of sand­ing. By this point, the birch veneer was com­plete­ly gone in some spots around the fingers. 

Last­ly, I used the Cri­cut to cre­ate some vinyl sten­cils for the large omega (the sym­bol used in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing for resis­tance). The sten­cil worked great, but the adhe­sive back end­ed up pulling off some small veneer fibers. So yet anoth­er draw­back of ply­wood here. The final step was to use some wipe-on gel polyurethane fin­ish. I think maybe doing the sten­cil between two lay­ers of fin­ish would have helped pre­vent the fibers lifting. 

One of the rea­sons to make this is that it’s not a show piece. This is just some­thing to replace the card­board box I had used for a cou­ple of years to store resis­tors. That way I can learn and prac­tice with no pres­sure. I def­i­nite­ly did learn a lot and I’m not even dis­ap­point­ed in the final result, despite the flaws. 

We’ve been doing a lot of spruc­ing up in our yard in the past few weeks. Angela has want­ed a raised gar­den bed for a long time and Bob of I Like to Make Stuff has a real­ly great, sim­ple design which he recent­ly built that I liked a lot. I will con­fess that I might have bought a kit if one had been avail­able. The price of the mate­ri­als end­ed up being about the same and it was a fun project.

The mate­ri­als for this were four 8′ deck­ing boards, a 4′ sec­tion of 2“x2” alu­minum angle, and some deck­ing screws (which I already had). I cut the deck­ing boards into 4′ lengths, two for each side.

Alu­minum is soft enough to cut with most wood­work­ing blades, so I cut the angle into four 1′ lengths1. I then used the band­saw to cut 1–1/2″ angles to one end of each length. These will act as spikes to hold the bed in place. I used a sim­pler cut than Bob’s, fig­ur­ing it would still stick in the ground well enough. I also used the band­saw and disk sander to round off the cor­ners. I left an inch gap at the top, as well so that the cor­ners would­n’t scrape any knees or shins. 

I worked out a screw pat­tern to attach the cor­ners to the boards. The deck­ing boards had a cou­ple of thin­ner chan­nels on the under­side, so I tried to put the screws into the “meati­er” sec­tions. The cor­ners are over­lap joints, so the screw pat­tern isn’t sym­met­ric on either side of the cor­ner. Once I worked out the pat­tern and “dry” fit a cor­ner sec­tion, I used the drill press to drill a set of holes. I messed up a cou­ple of hole loca­tions but anoth­er dry fit had the pat­tern final­ized. I drilled and coun­ter­sunk 32 holes into the aluminum.

Then it was time for assem­bly, which meant pre-drilling all those holes into the deck­ing. I prob­a­bly did­n’t have to pre-drill them, but as the holes were very close to the board ends, I want­ed to make sure they did­n’t tear out. 

Angela helped me car­ry the assem­bly into the gar­den where it was time to load up with soil and plants. Ains­ley helped her plant some veg­eta­bles. Some of these were seeds, so it looks more emp­ty than it is.

1. Bob’s design has longer cor­ner pieces, but he also appar­ent­ly had more alu­minum on hand than I could get. These alu­minum pieces aren’t espe­cial­ly cheap, either. [↩]

Our old wheel­bar­row had been sit­ting long enough that the han­dles had more-or-less turned into mulch. Iron­ic, as mulch is pri­mar­i­ly what we’ve car­ried around the yard in the wheel­bar­row. I had con­sid­ered mak­ing some new han­dles out of pres­sure-treat­ed pine, but replace­ment hard­wood han­dles weren’t ter­ri­bly expen­sive. So I ven­tured out to the big-box hard­ware store to get some (where I was in the vast minor­i­ty by wear­ing a face mask!). 

This project would have been just about impos­si­ble if I did­n’t have some Liq­uid Wrench to loosen up the rust­ed nuts. It took about 5 min­utes for it to work into the bolts and almost every­one came right off.

Once I got the entire wheel­bar­row apart, I traced over the bolt hole loca­tions to the replace­ment han­dles. My assis­tant was there to ensure that all mea­sure­ments were accu­rate and well-sniffed.

I used the drill press and a 3/8″ forstner bit drill the holes. I have a fair­ly cheap set of Ryobi bits (which pair nice­ly with my trusty Ryobi drill press!). I can def­i­nite­ly see pur­chas­ing a much nicer set of forstner bits as they are fast and clean.

I did spend a few min­utes clean­ing off some sur­face rust from some met­al parts with a wire brush and some min­er­al spir­its. I hit all of them with a coat of black spray paint to hope­ful­ly reduce some future rust. I did­n’t spend a lot of time and did­n’t even wait for the paint to dry before I re-assem­bled everything.

I re-assem­bled the wheel­bar­row minus a cou­ple of wood­en shim pieces. They had almost lit­er­al­ly turned to dirt at this point and would have been a pain to re-cut. I also need to get some zinc-coat­ed bolts and wash­ers at some point since the exist­ing bolts are now too long with out that shim in place. But it’s a 100% func­tion­ing wheel­bar­row again and looks pret­ty great actu­al­ly, as far as wheel­bar­rows go.