How To Resaw Wood To Make a Box with Seamless Grain Wrap ⧸⧸ DIY Woodworking

In today's Wood Story we are diving into the resawing of wood in order to create a stunning bookmatched box that can store all of your precious belongings. So go grab your tools and let's start this Wood Story. I've been woodworking for almost three years now and making boxes is one of my favorite things to do. I still have the very first box that I made and though I made a ton of mistakes I still keep this box because it's a great reminder of where I started and it makes me really proud of myself when I make new boxes and I can compare my progress. I am self-taught thanks to fellow YouTubers and online resources and if you're a beginner right now as well then some of these techniques may seem a little daunting but I urge you to give them a try because even if your box ends up with a ton of mistakes I will guarantee you that you will learn a ton along the way and that's going to really help you in your next project. So just keep building. So in woodworking there's something called the golden ratio when it comes to boxes and what it means is that when you have a box there can be a box that looks more symmetrical or pleasing to the eye because it has the right relationship between its two sides. Now of course you can make a completely square box but this is when you're making a rectangle box and what you want to do is you want to take whatever length you want and you want to divide that by 1.618 in order to figure out what your shorter side should be and you can do it opposite too so if you already know the shorter side of your box you can multiply it by 1.618 and that's going to give you the correct dimension. So what I am going to do is I have determined that my one side my shorter side should be 8 inches long that's what I want my shorter side to be and by applying this golden ratio of the 1.618 I now get a measurement that's called 12.944. Now I'm just going to round that up to 13 I don't think that's the biggest deal so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be doing a box that's going to be 8 by 13 and that's using this golden rule. As you're making your box you may also be wondering what kind of thickness you should make your box and it's really a very personal choice but there are a few things that you might want to keep in mind. If you are making a box for more of a rustic usage or if you're just trying it out for the very first time it's definitely easier working with a bit of a thicker edge and that will give you like a nice rustic result so if you're using something like pine and if the idea is it's just going to be like a nice and rustic box then you can definitely go anywhere from 5 8 to 3 quarters of an inch in thickness. However if you're making something that's for finer use such as for jewelry or maybe for your most precious tools then you want to go a little bit thinner and that's also great for hardwoods. I really like working with a thickness that's between 3 8 and up to half of an inch definitely not more than that. Now of course the most important thing is that you keep uniform pieces so whatever thickness you decide to do just make sure that's the same for the whole way around. But let's get into the box making now. The first thing we want to do is we want to split down the wood because I want to take my wood which is walnut in this case and I want to resaw it down the middle in order to be able to get two pieces out of this. When you get started with the resawing you want to find the middle point of your board so this one is five inches so that's going to be two and a half and then you want to put your blade the tallest tooth right to that mark. So this is my blade and this is my mark right here so it's touching my mark right there. The second thing you want to keep an eye out for is you want to cut it exactly in the middle so you're going to mark the middle of this board and then you're going to set your fence accordingly. However when you do that make sure once you've made the first pass all the way through that you flip your board this way instead of flipping it this way and the reason for that is if you were just a little bit wrong in setting the middle of this then by doing it the same way around you're at least going to get a nice straight cut all the way through where if you did it the other way then you risk that your one cut looks like this and the other one is like this and then they're not straight and that's going to cause issues afterwards so you're going to have to deal with. So remember that when you push it through slip it over this way before resawing. Also note that when you are resawing you do not need to start with the blade at its highest. You can easily take multiple passes on the same side and then slowly raise the blade until you reach that middle point. This is especially useful if your saw is underpowered because denser wood may cost your saw to stall if you start with your blade too high. So before we talked about the golden ratio when it comes to making a box and now that the wood has been resawn you can go ahead and open it up and that's instantly going to produce a nice book match and that's really attractive too when it comes to box making. It's going to make it look really appealing however in this case we're not going to make a giant box that's this wide. This would be more if you need to do a glue up you could glue these pieces together and get a really nice pattern but what you can also do is you can take these two pieces and you can rotate them around like this and then you also have a really nice match going in this direction where the grain flows. So that's what we're going to do we're going to leave the wood like this and then we're going to cut our pieces from this but there is a couple of things you have to keep in mind. So these pieces right here they need to belong together so I'm just going to mark those these are my belonging pieces they need to connect with each other but one of them needs to be the end and the other one needs to be the long side in order for us to have that square. We want to have the four pieces where we have a short piece and a long piece so we need to have a long piece a short piece a long piece and a short piece so whatever dimension you decided to do that's what we want to keep in mind as we cut this wood out. Now in order to actually connect the wood there's many different ways that you can do it you can either make a rabbet which is making this thin groove for the wood to sit on so that it is would essentially sit like this. You can also cut a miter a miter is going to be really nice a 45 degree miter because it's going to allow the two corners to connect with each other seamlessly but again we have to make sure that we only cut the miter on this side and on this side and not the other way around otherwise we're not going to get that nice match that we were talking about. So I think for myself I've decided that I'm going to do miters for this one but we will also cut a rabbet at the top where the actual lid is going to sit on so we're going to see a few different techniques used here today. So the first thing I'm going to do is just mark out my cuts and then get to work. So here is the progress of the miter corner cutting of the box. So I have laid out all my pieces and all of them now have a 45 degree miter on them on the inside that way when they get glued together they will go like this and as you can see the grain match is perfect right now. I did have one small hiccup when I went to go cut one of these I accidentally cut the miter in the wrong direction so I had to adapt a little bit and instead of this piece being eight inches it is now seven three quarters so it will just be a little bit off of the golden rule but I figured that maintaining the grain was more important than having the golden rule be exactly the same. So we'll see how that all looks when it's done but for now just for a visual there we go. Now I'm not going to glue up the box just yet there's a couple of things that we want to do before we start gluing up because now that the box is essentially assembled on the outside we have to think a little bit about what's going to go on the inside and one thing is we definitely want to have a bottom but we also want to have a lid. So what I want to do now is I want to add a rabbet to the top here which is essentially a notch that you cut out that way you can take another piece of wood and you can lay it fully on top so that it kind of blends in. You could also just have a lid that sits on top like that that I think is totally fine especially if it is the top for the box but for the bottom it's kind of nice to have it sitting on the inside so instead of it being like this it's essentially going to be sitting on the inside like that which is just going to make a really nice edge at the bottom. So we will be doing that next before gluing it up. Okay I actually lied before proceeding you want to make your bottom so that you know the final thickness your rabbet groove needs to be. I cut up several strips of walnut and then glued them together. You could also do another book match but I was running low on wood so this technique worked better for me. So now that we have all of our miters made I've made sure that they're all in the right direction so that once the box is assembled this is the up and this is the down direction and this is our bottom right here and we want to make a groove we want to make something called a rabbet at the bottom. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my board that I've already decided it's going to be this thickness and it did end up being a little bit thicker than the other size and that's okay I actually like to have a little bit more of a thicker bottom. This ended up being half of an inch. So I'm going to take my board and I'm going to hold it against here and I'm going to mark that and that is going to be the amount that we now need to remove in order to create the rabbet and there's a few different ways you can do that. You can either do that on a router table or you can do it on a table saw where you just slowly notch away at it. Now because this is a bit more material usually you would be using a dado stack which I do not have so I am going to be using my router table to take this away but I am going to go very slow because I'm going to try to avoid as much chip out as possible. So I'm only going to raise it a little bit at a time and slowly work my way to get that kind of nice groove. So all of our rabbets are now done and what I've also done is I've gone ahead and I've sanded the inside and I've taken great care only to sand the top and when I sanded the rabbet I only used a brick to go back and forth. So you want to be really really gentle because you don't want to risk anything happening to your miter corners or it's going to look really weird afterwards. And the other thing that I've done is I've added painters tape to the inside just where the edge of the miter goes and the reason for that is because once we start gluing up the joints there's going to be glue that's going to spill out and it's going to be difficult to remove. So this is just going to help eliminate some of it because it will be a really really difficult area to sand after the fact. So I've matched them all up in the right order taking really great care to make sure that they are in the right order and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to flip them over like this and we're going to be preparing for our glue up. So in order to glue these up we're going to use painters tape in order to hold all of our miter joints together. So I'm going to line these up really carefully and I'll just do one at a time with the tape here and I'm going to apply a piece of tape on this side of the seam. So I'm going to make sure again that it's really really accurate and you might have some small gaps that's okay I have a trick for that later on that I'll show you. Okay perfect we're going to add our tape and this is the tape that's actually going to hold it in place so we're going to be really careful with that and now comes the really tricky part which is to flip it over without actually ruining all this and then we still got to do the last one here but we'll do that at the end when we're ready for the glue up. So we're going to pick it up and flip it over very carefully okay just like that. All right so now the idea is we're going to add glue and then we're going to put it up like this and the painter's tape is going to hold it together. I also recommend using a couple of clamps or if you have it you can use something like a strap clamp like this one but the painter's tape is great it's more than enough strength just to hold it together but the other strap clamp will just make it a little bit tighter but again we don't want to go crazy because if you go too crazy you might end up splitting in a different spot so we want to urge on the side of caution here. Okay so now we're going to get ready for our glue up. While the box dried up I finished cutting the previously made bottom to size and started working on the lid. The lid I made by first resawing some wood again and then I glued these pieces together in order to have a nice bookmatched top that was big enough to be my lid. When the box was dry I took some time to fix a few of my miter corners that had some small imperfections. This is easily done by using a damp rag to first moisten the wood and then rolling it with some sort of round tool such as a screwdriver. And once it's dry your miters will be pretty much perfect. And with that done it was time to attach the bottom of the box with wood glue and allow it to dry. The lid for my box is a loose laying lid that sits within the previously made rabbet groove so it needs some sort of handle so that it's easy for you to grab. I chose to make a wooden handle and added a little maple inlay. I find that adding small subtle details such as this one can really make the final product stand out. I chose to finish my box with several layers of boiled linseed oil followed by shellac coating. Now some people hate the smell of linseed oil so you may want to choose a less pungent finish though the shellac does seal most of it in. I went ahead and I customized my box with an insert and I even made a little box with some spline corners. And with that done the box was a done. Let me know in the comments below what you're planning on making a box for. Will it be for jewelry, your most precious tools or perhaps a keepsake memory box? Thanks so much for watching. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe for more great content and I'll see you soon in the next wood story.