Ring Bearer Box

During lock-down I received a commission to make a ring bearer box for a wedding set for next year. Luckily I had just converted the family garden shed into a mini workshop so felt I was prepared to  take on such a task. Now as you may have noticed, the content of this blog has strayed some what from it's original focus and if you've been following since 2014, you will know that I was concentrating mostly on prop making and a career in the theatre/film industry. Although my love for these things has not changed, my interests and career aspirations have. I am now focusing on building my skills and knowledge in carpentry, traditional woodwork, coppicing and green woodwork. My next big project to come will be a wooden electric bike, made from Ash (read this book if you want to know more about this incredible wood!) which will hopefully test and improve my skills in this area greatly. For now however and while I am separated from my uni workshop and machines I'm focusing on smaller projects as well as researching and writing about various things related to woodworking and trees.

So, without further ado, here is the box:

*This build write-up will be shorter than most as I am busy working on another project!*

I began by looking through Pinterest for ring box ideas, then moved onto a sketch book to scribble down some rough designs. During this process I was also sourcing materials and suppliers to make sure that my design was practical. After my initial designs were finalised I moved to Rhino 3D and began to build a model of the box. 

I wanted to challenge myself and so designed the box in a triangular shape with lots of angles. I love brass and walnut together and so decided to inset brass triangles into the top portion of the box. To add a little extra detail I decided to have a strip of Ash (I had to use mahogany in the end) running through the top and bottom pieces. I only have a few hand tools at my home workshop which made things a little difficult, but with a little ingenuity (and lots of time) anything is possible! The first task was to cut strips of walnut and sandwich the mahogany detail in the middle. The long strips would then be cut into the specific pieces for the box. Creating strips rather than individual pieces is much quicker and allows for more accuracy and uniformity between pieces. I made a DIY coping saw to cut the pieces as I'd lost my own. The walnut is 3.5mm thick and the mahogany sticks are 3x3mm.

Unfortunately the walnut I had bought was a little dull and lacked any interesting grain patterns, however once it had been sanded (up to 600) and a coat of Danish Oil applied, the appearance improve greatly. The picture below is before any sanding or oil .. not pretty!

The next step was to create the angles along the edges of the strips. This turned out to be quite difficult, but fortunately (and after a lot of trial and error) I found a method that worked really well: I had some blocks of lime wood lying about and cut the specific angle required along the top. I then aligned this piece with the top of the walnut strip and used a sanding stick/rasp resting on the guide to make the angle. I repeated this for each edge of the walnut until they all had the correct angle. 

  

A photo of the lime guides being cut.. you can never have too many clamps! 

 I forgot to take pictures of quite a few of the intervening steps here, but as you can see below, I cut all the individual pieces from the strips and then sanded the angles of the two freshly cut edges.

For the top pieces, I first cut the holes for the brass triangles to sit inside. I drilled a pilot hole at the bottom of the triangle, then used my DIY pin saw to clear the rest of the wood out. I then used a sanding stick of various grits to make all the edges smooth. The brass piece had to fit exactly so this took some time and precision sanding. 

I then used a print out of the base of my 3D design to align and glue all the pieces together. I found some chunky gel gorilla tape which was really great for holding the pieces in place. 

I used Resin 8's Fill It epoxy resin mixed with their beautiful mica powders to create the base of the box. I love the contrast between the natural material of the wood and the crisp, bold colours of the resin. The deep blue also brings out the simple beauty of the gold rings that will sit on top. 

Now its time for regaling the tale of the epic fail.. So I wanted the triangles on the inside to match the blue epoxy in the bottom, but I didn't want to use the epoxy as I was worried that a) the epoxy would leak through any tiny gaps between the walnut and the brass triangles. b) the resin would not cure as the epoxy I had bought was for deep casts and is un-accelerated. c) I was being impatient and didn't want to wait for the epoxy to be delivered. 

So I decided to experiment ... 

To make this rather striking blue sludge I mixed together a standard batch of saw dust and wood glue to create some woodfiller. I then added some mica powder to the mix, giving the concoction a rather lovely blue tinge. I decided to add a little more glue as the mica powder had made it turn into quite a thick paste. Unfortunately the glue lid popped off as I was squeezing the bottle and sent a whole dollop into my filler mix making it extremely runny. Rather than discarding the whole thing and starting again as I should have done, I decided to spoon it into the triangular holes anyway and hope that it would dry regardless. This did not happen. The filler took around 24 hrs to dry and shrank and cracked massively. Fortunately I was able to save it by covering the disaster with a new, thicker mix. After the second batch had dried, I sanded it smooth and reminded myself of the lesson learnt from the blunder - patience is everything! 

I sanded the whole thing up to 600 grit and finished with Danish Oil. I'll end this write up here, I'm sorry that it's such a quick one, but I've got a lot of other things on the go right now that are taking up most of my attention :)

- Stay Safe -