At this point it’s time to start the glue up. After some thought I was pretty sure that if
I tried to glue up all four corner joints at once it would be a problem. Because there are so many different surfaces
in the box joints, I was afraid the glue would start to set up before I could
get it assembled and clamped. To reduce
that possibility only two corners will be done at a time. Somewhere in the forest of clamps below is
the wastebasket. This just goes to show
the old saying of, “You can never have too many clamps.” is really true.
After gluing the other two corners together and letting
the clamped assembly cure overnight here is the end result. The photo on the right is a close view of the
glued corner in it you can see the slight bit the pins and tails extend. That’s because it’s easier to sand them flush
versus trying to bring the whole face down flush. For the real wastebasket I will reduce the
depth of cut just a little so I don’t have so much to remove to bring the
joints flush.
Bringing them flush is done using a random orbital sander
with a 60-grit sanding disk to carefully sand them just flush. The sanding disk then gets changed to a finer
120-grit disk and the whole surface is sanded smooth. The bottom photo is a closer view of the
finished surface. 
Making and installing the supports for the bottom are
next and are made from leftover pieces of cedar. The top edge gets an angle cut to match the
slant of the of sides so the bottom lays flat on them. That’s easy since the table saw still has
that angle set on it. Next, they get cut
to about ¼” square. To mark their length
a sharp marking gauge is used. That’s
shown in the photos below. Once cut they
get glued in place and nailed using a 22-gauge pin nailer.
The bottom is cut from a piece of ¼” oak veneered plywood
with the edges beveled to fit the tapered sides. This is what that looks like from the bottom
and while the plywood looks pretty bad, which it is, that’s because this
leftover only had one good veneered face and that’s on the inside. 
The bottom is installed next by applying a thin bead of
glue on the supports. Clamping it in
place while the glue cures is shown in the photo below. No mechanical fasteners here. Actually, the only mechanical fastening in
the whole piece are the pin nails used to hold the supports in place while
their glue dries.
Once the bottom is installed final sanding is done which
includes softening all of the sharp corners with a sanding block and hand
sanding. The left photo shows the
wastebasket done and ready to finish. I
had not planned on putting on a finish this piece because I anticipated more
problems in getting the jig to work and thought the test pieces would get used
up solving problems in the build. That
was not the case so it’s going to get a finish which will be four coats of
Watco Danish Oil finish. Since the cedar
is a soft wood, I think that it will get dinged up over the years and this type
of finish is easily reparable. The oil
also results in a nice warm color as shown in the right photo.
At this point the testing is done and I can start on the actual wastebasket to be made out of cherry. This build will follow the same process as the test piece so going through the whole process would be redundant. My plans are to take occasional photos along the way at various milestones to let everyone know how it’s going.
Here in the top photo the cherry has been ripped to ½”
thickness with all three pieces glued and clamped together. The photo on the right shows a straight ruler
being used to check and make sure the glued-up boards are flat and not
bowed. If there were a bow light would
be visible under the ruler. The bottom
photo is after the panel has been squared up, trimmed to width and sanded with
220 grit.
All went well with cutting the individual tapered panels
to size. Using the jig to cut the box
joints also went well or at least I thought it did until the first test
assembly. For some reason two of the box
joints in two panels were not cut to the correct depth and are about 1/32” too
shallow. I have no idea why since they
were all cut with the same setup plus the ones on either side were fine. I suppose that’s better than being too deep
since the fix is to recut those to the proper depth. The problem is getting the pieces back
exactly where they were in the jig to begin with because if the alignment isn’t
perfect the joint is going to be cut too wide and there will be a gap. Ordinarily with non-tapered pieces this would
be easy, just butt the piece up against the reference board. However, with the taper when the first joint
is cut a little bit of the reference point gets cut off. This photo shows the gap with the piece
correctly aligned.
To get the alignment rather than eyeball the location I
used the original spacer (red arrow, bottom photo) when the location was set for
the Vertical Indexer. With the spacer in
the slot cut by the dado blade the piece is set tight to it and clamped in
place.
With everything set the first pass of recutting the joint
is made. Here the red arrow points to
where the cut was made just a little bit deeper. After both of the joints were recut when the
wastebasket was reassembled for another test fit everything fit together just
right. I would note that the depth of
cut made by the blade was not changed for the recut.
Next Up – Filling a Flaw, Assembly & Finishing
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