A Beginning

I have been working with wood for decades, first with renovating houses, then into serious bird carving and now finally into making distinctive boxes. Since I have a small workshop, making boxes is an ideal activity. While I also make the occasional piece of furniture, box making is my passion. With over 40 different kinds of wood in my shop, it's sometimes difficult to decide what wood I'll use next. It also means that it's sometimes difficult to manoeuvre in my small space.

Richard, a fellow woodworker, is a phenomenal wood detective. It's amazing the wood he's able to find and I have benefited many times from his searching. Another woodworker I know has wood from all around the world and his place is like a candy store. I can never resist buying just what I need but always seem to end up with a few other pieces that I know will make fabulous boxes.
Making boxes also means that I can use small pieces of wood, and slicing them into veneers means that valuable wood is put to its maximum use.

 I also get wood from unusual sources. The stump above came from a neighbour's back yard after a windstorm. My friend, Richard arrived with his chainsaw and cut it into manageable pieces.

 The pieces were sealed and left to dry for over a year before I started to started to straighten up the sides. They were sealed again and left for a few more months before they were sliced into thinner pieces.

I also discovered some beautiful pieces of curly maple in a friend's woodpile. Hank was kind enough to give me quite a few pieces to take home to my shop. It was amazing that the company had cut the entire tree into fireplace pieces. While it certainly provided good firewood, it would have been so much better for the wood to have been used for something that would have lasted.

This is a 1940's Beaver bandsaw that I originally used to cut the wood into thinner pieces that I could use for my boxes.  Eventually I had to get a bigger saw to deal with larger pieces of wood so the Beaver is no longer in my workshop. The picture shows some of the firewood being sliced into veneer.