A small bench gift box

We’ll give a garden bench to my inlaws as a Christmas present, but the idea came too late for any bench to be built in time. A card is boring, so I made a box…

The box was made from oak planks, filled with fir plane shavings as packaging material and a miniature bench. I finished the box with some water based laquer (Trestjerners gulvlakk silkematt vannbasert for my Norwegian readers). I applied two coats and scraped the first one with a card scraper. Came out silky smooth.

The box was constructed by cutting the bottom, lid and sides from a small oak plank. I then shooted the pieces square on my bench hook and epoxied them together using masking tape as hinges. Sorry, no images of that process.
I then smoothed the exterior with the old Stanley No.4, sanded the roundovers with my Bosch orbital sander and used a card scraper on some reversing grain.

I then used my band saw and cut the lid off. I smoothed the cuts and glued some beech sticks as a “lip” to hold the lid in place.

The small bench was made from beech sticks cut to components which then was superglued into a bench. A few strokes with a smoothing plane and some sand paper to round over the deges, and it was done.

On one shaving I wrote “The bench will come in a bigger version in 2021. Merry Christmas!”.

Inside the lid, I wrote “Oak from Rygg” and signed it. The oak I used came from an oak tree I felled on the farm where my wife grew up.

The old oak

Huge oak I felled and cut to planks

A year ago, the box was about 10 to 15 metres in the air. I felled the tree and cut it to planks. I got the materials for the box from some thin and crooked discarded pieces that I left to dry in my shop. Most of that piece ended up as kindling, but I got one plank about 1x15x40cm for the box.

A fun and quick project. I find the fact that the box, which my mother- and father-in-law got for Christmas, grew just outside their old barn (the farm now belongs to my brother-in-law). Makes it a bit special, I think.

BTW: Yes. I do look twice on my firewood pile some times…

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