in Cocobolo and Walnut Copyright 2005 Dan Shapiro www.nothingseveredyet.com dan at danshapiro.com Step 1 As with all good projects, you’ll want to be sure your stock is straight and true. Joint, plane, and rip to width your walnut so you have a single board at least 26” long by 2” tall and 3/4” thick. Decide which side will be the front, and draw cutlines on the back. Label each piece. The back is the leftmost, then the right side, then the front, then the left. This ensures that the grain will be continues from the left to the front to the right. If this is confusing, I suggest making a little paper cutout so you can demonstrate for yourself. Then take up origami, because woodworking is obviously too complicated for you. Lumber________ Walnut (sides) 26” x 2” x 1/2” Walnut (bottom) 7 3/4” x 3” x 3/8” Cocobolo (top) 7 3/4” x 3” x 3/8” Spanish Cedar (lining) 26” x 2” x 1/4” Tools & Materials_ Table saw 1” Chisel 6” clamps Band clamp Deft Gloss Spray Lacquer Sandpaper (100, 150, 220 grit) Powdered Rottenstone Wood glue (e.g. Titebond II) 2 Brass hinges, 1” wide Parts List Step 2 Step 3 Start out with a bang—the first time you put saw to wood on this project is the most critical. Now’s a good time to break out some scrap and practice if you’re feeling queasy. You have three choices. You can rough-cut the pieces to size, then miter them on a router table. You can rough-cut them, then miter them on the table saw. Or you can cut them, miter intact, directly on the table saw, then recut the half of them that are facing the wrong way. While you may think the first or last choices are cleverest, you’d be wrong for reasons I don’t feel like going into right now. Rough cut on the tablesaw, then miter on the tablesaw. This is the best way to get them all precisely the same length. You’ll also waste as little wood between pieces as possible, ensuring that the grain flows nicely from side to front. Don’t forget to remember to flip the miter direction on each side of the cut: Remember: if you mess this step up, your heirloom humidor will be an embarrassment to your children and your children’s children, your cigars will taste like cardboard, and I will never speak to you again. Cut a 1/4” deep by 1/4” wide rabbet along the top and bottom of each of the four pieces. This can be accomplished using a straight bit in a router table, a tablesaw with the blade tilted, or a hyperactive and overly precise woodchuck. Time to prepare the top and bottom. You may want to make them a bit oversized at this point so you can trim them to size. You can make them from a single panel. But for bonus points (and a terrific look), you can split a single piece of lumber and bookmatch the two pieces. A 3/4” thick piece of lumber will yield two pieces just over 1/4” thick, which is ideal for our purposes. The trick is gluing up lumber this thin. Place the pieces to be glued on flat, square risers to get them off the surface. You can then put clamps horizontally across the width to hold them together. Use two small additional clamps vertically at the corners to hold them flush. Normally you’d want to reinforce a joint like this with a spline or something, but it’s really too thin for anything useful to fit. Fortunately, the joint will be supported by the box itself. And if you’re wondering, I had a narrow strip of Nicaraguan cocobolo that I glued up for the top, and a nice piece of lightly figured walnut that I bookmatched for the bottom. Money shot! Time to see if you nailed step 2, or if it nailed you. Using two clamps (not recommended) or a band clamp or two (strongly recommended), glue up all four sides. They have to be dead flat and perfectly square or the top and bottom won’t fit. Since you’re not reinforcing the joint with any sort of spline or biscuit (although it’s probably not a bad idea to do so), your miters had better be spot-on 45°. Since glue will squeeze out all over the place, you might want to mask any exposed wood with masking tape. In any case, best of luck. Step 4 Step 5 Since the top and bottom may not yet be perfectly flush with the box, after the glue has dried, trim them flat. You can do this in two passes on the tablesaw with the blade raised just past the halfway point of the box’s thickness. Be sure to use pushsticks. I am not renaming my blog if you mess this step up. Alternately, if you have a stationary belt sander (not a handheld one), that might not be a bad alternative. If Step 4 went well, this will be a snap. Trim your top and bottom to size and glue them in place. At this point, it’s OK if the top and bottom are too thick—you'll take care of that in Step 7. To make it easier to clamp and to avoid marring the surfaces, use a large scrap block on the top and bottom. This will also distribute the force more evenly across the glue joint. Step 6 Step 7 Time for the all-important cedar lining. Be sure to use Spanish cedar and not Tennessee cedar. You want to age your cigars, not kill moths. I’m going to skip exact dimensions, because you should measure for yourself so it’s a precise fit for your box. You need to make four cedar strips that will be taller than the bottom half of the box, but not so tall that they prevent the lid from closing firmly. They must also be long enough to fit snugly in place (you won’t glue them). For the lining on the bottom and top, you can skip it if you prefer to save room for what’s important. If you do decide to go for a cedar lining in your bottom and top, glue it in place with just a few spots of glue, so expansion/contraction doesn’t crack it. Open Sesame! You can do this with a tablesaw or a bandsaw. A bandsaw will take a thinner slice out of your box, but I find it easier to cut straight using a tablesaw. You can literally just repeat Step 7, shifting the fence 1” to the left and adjusting the blade depth. Cut the long sides all the way through, but cut the short sides so there’s a little wood holding them in place. Then finish the job with a handsaw. Step 8 Step 9 Your travel humidor will take a beating, and corners show damage like nobody’s business. The safest bet is to round over the outer corners of the box. Take several light passes with a standard router bit—a 1/4” roundover is fine. Use a router table, because if you try to do this with a router freehand you’re likely to launch your new humidor across the room. You can also chamfer a 45 degree angle if you prefer that look, although it’s more damage prone. And hey, if you’re feeling brave, don’t let me stop you from leaving a sharp 90 degree corner. Worst case is you have to dig out these instructions again and make another. Last but not least, hinges. I used cheapo brass 1” hinges from Home Depot, but you can get much nicer ones from Rockler (see the Links section at the end). If your hinges are interior ones like mine, you’ll need to round over or chamfer the edge so the lid doesn’t catch while opening. The picture on the right shows this more clearly. You can make the opening with a good, sharp chisel… just go slowly! You’ve come a long way, so this is a lousy time to mess up your project. Practice on some scrap first. Also note that if you are using a hinge that’s the same depth as the thickness of your box walls, your hinge cutout has only two sides instead of three, making things a lot easier. Step 10 Step 11 You’re nearly finished! Ha ha ha, that joke never gets old. For the humidor, you want a finish that is reasonably tough, water and alcohol resistant, and easy to apply. Wipe-on polyurethane would probably be an excellent choice, but I went with a spray-on lacquer. The details are linked to in the appendix, but to summarize: Seal with shellac Spray with Deft gloss lacquer, many coats Rub vigorously with powdered rottenstone and water Step 12 Step 13 Fill up, show off, and enjoy! This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. All physical manifestations of these instructions can be sold and traded freely. In plain English, you’re free to give copies of this to anyone. You can also “remix” it to make something new from the images and text. Either way, you can’t charge money for it or change the license without my permission. However, anything you build from these plans belongs to you, and you can do whatever you want with it. Seems reasonable, huh? Legal Mumbo Jumbo More tips, tricks, and details Nothing Severed Yet, the woodworking weblog www.nothingseveredyet.com How to bookmatch small pieces on your tablesaw http://tinyurl.com/bdsmm How to apply the lacquer finish http://tinyurl.com/ahmql Considerations on working with cocobolo http://tinyurl.com/8uqjd Techniques for gluing everything together http://tinyurl.com/a8ztv and http://tinyurl.com/cu3zy Recommended Sources Walnut Cigars http://tinyurl.com/8r57h http://www.jrcigars.com Cocobolo Humidifier http://tinyurl.com/8czqx http://tinyurl.com/6aouc Spanish cedar Really nice hinges http://tinyurl.com/dtupv http://tinyurl.com/afskn Links back right front left