Wood-fired!

Xmas tea caddy

December 29th, 2008

Tea caddies in Padauk

I made these boxes for some friends this Xmas. They were filled with various appropriate things - smarties for the clever, pistachios for the nuts¹, etc. But they were intended as tea caddies, ie a box you can put your tea bags in (let’s face it everyone uses them) and keep on your kitchen counter near the kettle.

The project started with an experiment. I had some very highly rippled eucalypt that looked amazing but was quite hard to work into a piece precisely because of its spectacular appearance. I decided to quarter the pieces to make a square where the ripples more-or-less aligned. I found that skewing them slightly gave a more non-euclidean impact.

Lid of quartered rippled eucalypt

A small box like this is often made whole and then the lid is cut off on a bandsaw. After the sawn edges are trued with a plane, you need to create a lip of some sort so the the lid registers over the box and has a smooth sliding fit that holds the lid in place. This is often done with a thin fillet of wood glued inside the body of the box.

In this case I didn’t want to use a fillet and so dreamt up (well I was almost asleep when the idea arose) a solution that creates a band of contrasting wood on the outside of the box. (I will explain the detail in a followup post on the construction.) As I was using the rippled eucalypt for the top panel, I went for the quarter-sawn grain pattern (perpendicular to the ripple figure) for the band. You can see in the following pic the wavy grain that gives rise to the ripple effect. Having the band wood in the same physical orientation as the top panel enhanced the effect for those of us that notice such things.

Banded in eucalypt. Mother-of-pearl buttons help align the top.

As with any hand-made wooden box there is only one way the lid fits correctly. The problem is doubled when the box is square. I used a dot of mother-of-pearl to indicate the correct alignment.

The next pic shows how the lid is held in place.

The eucalypt band is rebated on the inside and the lid has a matching rebate on the outside

The padauk (Pterocarpus dalbergiodes) will darkened considerably with age. The inside is left unfinished so food contents will not be contaminated. The inside will keep its bright orange colour so when the outside darkens there will be a pleasing contrast when the box is opened.

I will post shortly on the construction of these boxes for those who are interested in such things.

1. only joking G & F [↩]

Entry Filed under: Wood