Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
Here are the Texas Flag Bandsaw Boxes I dreamed up on a motorcycle ride in North Texas. I had two cedar beam off cuts from our back yard pergola we had built a few years ago. I didn't know what I wanted to do with them until the fore mentioned ride. I knew I wanted something unique and I think I got it. I started with blocks roughly 5×7 inches. I first cut the wave into the face, then cut the top and bottom waves. This way I had as much surface area on the saw table as possible. Then top and bottom waves were cut. Layout was done with a set of french curves. I sanded the face to 220 before cutting because it's easier to sand on a solid surface than trying to sand the drawers and box separately. The rest was standard cut the back off, cut out the drawers and reassemble. Since I did these for my first craft show I made a batch of five (six if you include the prototype) The second and third pictures illustrate how I kept all the parts straight for each box and just how complicated it got. I closed the entry kerf for the drawers by simply gluing clamping them shut, this really opened up the big drawer kerf, so that had to be filled with a spline. In order to keep the colors where they were intended I carved a shallow groove to delineate the stripes and field and prevent the stain from leeching into the wrong area. Three of the five were torched to bring out the grain, the other two were so tight grained that the torching just turned into a smudge. I created a flexible stencil for the star, and after some fits and starts settled on using the stencil to pencil in the star and free handing the stain in the lines. I used Minwax Waterbased stains for the colors, after using their wood conditioner. Then a coat of wipe on poly followed by two coats of polycrylic. The oil based wipe on poly was to seal in the color and keep the polycrylic from smearing it. I got alot of positive comments at the fair but only one buyer. May have been a little proud of them, I don't know. I do know that I'm thrilled with the results and love showing them off. In the second picture, you can see where the saw drifted on a knot at about the one o'clock position of the big drawer, I backed up, slowed my feed and recut my line. Afterward, I used a thin spline to fill the offending kerf and it's virtually invisble. Hope you like them.