Pencil Box

One Box of Oak Flooring from 2001

  I have often addressed the fact that I have lots of wood scraps piled around the shop and in storage. In the past I have referred to this as my wood scrap pile.    It continues to be a goal of mine to eventually reach the last chunk of all those pieces of wood that I have collected through out the years.   If I don't, the kids will have one big campfire at the end.   For now I am trying to use more wood from my scrap pile and avoid accumulating new.   (Still it is hard to pass up any free pieces that I come across.) 

A few of the pieces pulled out of the box. 

        Our kitchen floor was covered with Oak flooring when we move in this house back in 2001.   When we arrived I saw that I had inherited a box of left over pieces from that floor project.  It is real Oak.  It is finished on one side. It is 5/16's of an inch thick and comes in various lengths with the longest being 24 inches of so.    (Finding this box of real Oak was like a sign from heaven that this must be the home that we have been looking for.)

All pieces cut to size 

     I stumbled onto a plan that called for thin pieces of wood so I was thinking that this would be an opportunity for me to use up some of that oak that I had been hording for almost a decade and a half.   The plan was for a pencil box.  Of course now days I am not sure if anyone really needs a pencil box, but I decided to give this idea a whirl.  In fact I decided to build four of these.

Wooden dowels were used to support all the joints 

                                                                                  These are pretty small boxes.   I did need to purchase a couple round dowels.   One was 1/8th inch thick and the other was 1/4 of an inch in diameter.  There are no nails or screws used in the assembly of these boxes.  The joints are mitered and held together with glue and little homemade wood pins.   In this process you drill a hole in the joint, pound a dowel with glue into the hole,  and once the glue has dried you sand the end of the dowel flush with the wood.

Four pencil boxes 

     The end result is that you have a two tiered storage box for pencils.   The top swivels to the side to reveal the bottom.  There is a lid that slides over the top that locks the top in place and keeps the pencils from falling out.    The plan calls this project an "Artist's Pencil Box" and it is for the purpose of carrying colored pencils.    You can store an eraser at one end.

A couple neighbor kids --Hanna & Mercy Hicks 

The neighbor kids helped give me a couple ideas that I implemented which made the boxes work a little better.   I still have plenty of oak flooring pieces on hand so there probably will be more small projects down the road.  (Hopefully before another decade and a half go by.)

  I'm thinking that someday I will design one that could  hold colored markers.