Not too long ago the small plastic wastebasket in the second bedroom where we have the desktop computer and its related peripherals just fell apart due to old age. As a temporary receptacle we stuck an old kitchen garbage can in there. My wife suggested we go somewhere like Walmart or Home Depot to get one similar to the old one. Now that’s probably the quickest and easiest solution but I had another idea. Why not make a nicely designed one out of cherry to match the desk and side unit since there is fully dried cherry in my wood stack just waiting to be used?
First step is to sit down and do some sketching out of different designs then take the promising ones and draw them up to scale in Sketchup refining the proportions and making sure a small wastebasket liner will fit. In the end I came up with five different designs.
The far left one is pretty straight forward but has some problems with accommodating the cross-grain expansion or seeing end grain and I don’t like either. The next one looks simple but the tapered corner miters are anything but. They require both a tilt to the blade plus an angle set on the miter gauge. Also, once assembled the corners will need to be reinforced with splines for strength. The math for calculating the angles gets a little messy but if you are interested here are the formulas:
Miter Angle= Inverse Tangent (1 /(Cosine in degrees * Tangent (360 degrees / 2 * number of staves)))
Blade Angle= inverse tangent (cosine of MA* Tangent of Slope angle)
Grinding through the calculations gives a Miter angle of 85.012 degrees and a Blade angle of 44.78 degrees. The center one is a segmented turning that would provide the opportunity to add some interest in the layers but I recently completed a segmented piece so want to try something different. The right two are similar where one has dovetailed corners and the other uses box joints.
After some thought I decided to develop the far-right
sketch that uses box joints at the corners because I like the effect the box
joints give. However, rather than use
equal sized box joints I decided to see what using two different sized joints
looked like. The drawing below shows the
result when alternating between ½” and 1” box joints. The colors are only for making the joints
easily visible.
With the dimensions of the piece known it’s off to the
lumber stacks to pull material. Below
are four cherry boards that are possibilities.
I will only be using two but haven’t decided which two yet.
Because angled box joints are nothing I have ever tried
before there will be some testing to make sure that I can make what I
designed. As an architect friend once
said, “Every designer should have to build what they designed.” a quote that
has come back to haunt me time and time again.
My test material is 5/8”x 6”X6’ rough sawn cedar fencing. They are cheap and if one sorts though enough
pieces there are maybe 5% that are straight grained with few knots or at least
few enough to work around. The only problem
is they have a high moisture content and are too wet to use without
drying. This takes a few months for them
to dry but here in the desert where the humidity is low that’s not a problem so
I always keep half a dozen or so on hand. 
After cutting around the flaws, cutting to length then
sanding the pieces smooth and finally cutting to rough width here is what the
test clamping looks like.
The glue up process is next. Rather than gluing up all three boards at
once I decided to do it in two steps so I have time to make sure the faces are
aligned as best as possible. The top
photo shows the first two boards glued together. The bottom photo is a closer view of how I
align the board faces. The red arrow is
pointing to the joint and the clamp used to align the board faces. Once aligned the next vertical clamp is
added, tightened down, the clamp used for alignment gets removed, relocated
down the board and the process gets repeated.
Shown is after the last vertical clamp has been installed.
The same process is repeated when adding the third board.
After the glue has cured the blank is removed from the
clamps and run through the thickness sander to level out the surfaces and get
rid of any small flaws. The top photo is
the blank ready for sanding and in the bottom photo is it all sanded ready to
be used for testing. I won’t be making
the cherry blank until there is a completed process of making the box joints
just in case things go horribly wrong with the testing.
However, before any testing can be done with making the
desired box joints of unequal sizes that are also at an angle, I need to come
up with a way to cut them. After doing
some research and a lot of drawings I believe that this jig may let me do
that. Below is a front and back view of
the plans. The two different wastebasket pieces are shown in color with how I think they will be located in the
jig. The next post will start
construction on said jig.
Next Up – Jig: Materials, Runners & Part 1 Base
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