Making a bandsaw box from scraps of wood

I decided to make a bandsaw box for my daughter from scraps of wood leftover from other projects. This is a great little project if you have a bandsaw and something I’ve never tried before. If you don’t own a bandsaw, then I hope you still may find this of interest.

The attraction of a bandsaw box is that they can be made any shape or size you want, from scraps of wood. And they can be done completely freehand. You need a hunk of wood around 3 or 4 inches thick and ideally a narrow blade on your bandsaw. I’ve used a 1/8″ blade from Tuffsaws for the tighter curves and a 1/2″ blade for everything else.

There’s a nice mystery to a completed bandsaw box that will be revealed in this post. At first glance it’s hard to conceive how the box is constructed.

First off, you’ll need a thick piece of wood which can be made up by laminating thinner pieces together. I’ve sandwiched a few cut offs of birch plywood in between some thin scraps of Ash. Dimensions don’t matter. Clamp them all together with glue and let it dry.

Cut out the shape of the box. This can be whatever you like – I’ve gone for a basic curve printed off the computer and stuck to my block of wood with spray adhesive.

Sand this smooth and slice off 1/4″ off the back of the box.

Then layout the drawer of the box which we’ll cut out next. Try and enter the cut along the grain of the wood. We’ll be gluing this shut and this should be invisible to the untrained eye when the box is finished.

Slice off 1/4″ off the front and back of this inside of the box. Make sure everything is labelled. Now we need to cut out the drawer itself. Layout a u-shaped design of your choice and cut this out.

Next we need to sand all the curved surfaces. This is a fairly tedious job and if you’re just making this for fun you can stop when you like. If you go too far the drawer will be a little sloppy. I’ve used a Triton oscillating spindle sander which makes quick work of it. But so long as my daughter’s not reading this – I left some little seen surfaces fairly rough!

Now all we need to do is glue it all together.

Rather than a drawer pull, drill a hole in the back to push the drawer open.

More sanding and it’s ready for finish.

I didn’t like the look of the curved plywood edge so masked the Ash edges and faces with blue painter’s tape and painted it with a can of black spray paint from Lidl. The Ash had two coats of clear lacquer.

And here’s my daughter – I think she’s happy with it!