Wooden Cupcake Box - Resawing Basswood

Why wood you resaw basswood?^typo Why would you resaw by hand? Is it because you're stupid?

No, ridiculous straw-man who I just made up. I needed a base, and I preferred the entire base to be made of one species of wood. If I doubled the width of my thick piece of basswood, I would be OK.

I found the basswood easy to work with. We got along great. It understood what I was trying to do, and it followed my lead. We found a rhythm of working together that just synced. I knew I wanted my first time to be with basswood.

So, I clamped it down and sawed the bitch in two.

Seriously, though, I had a reason. I was trying to build this box in secret, and my fiancée was out for the night.

It did this all on a Saturday, and she had our shared car. I could have gone a bought more wood Sunday morning, but I live in an area where there is no separation of church and state. By law, nothing but "essentials" are open, meaning restaurants, gas stations, and liquor stores (for some reason). You can go to some convenience stores like 7-11, but you can't buy "non-essential" things, like a flashlight. The stores seriously hang a sheet over the flashlights with a sign saying that can't be purchased on a Sunday because they are electronic.</rant>

So, I either got all the sawing and gluing done in one night, or I risked the box not being complete in time for Christmas.

I pulled out my homemade marking gauge and scratched a mark all the way around the board.

I watched Roy Underhill do this a few times while I was initially cutting the walls. I tried to emulate what he did.

The board divided pretty evenly. I was happy with how this turned out, but it took a lot longer than I expected. Part of that was because I was using a backsaw rather than a regular rip saw. For such a thin board, I wanted the precision. There wasn't much room for a mistake.

To glue the boards together, I needed a way to clamp them. I used two boards in parallel as mount points for my clamps. By making both boards square to the edge of my desk I knew they were parallel. One clamp pulled the basswood toward one block. The other clamp couldn't reach across, so I inverted it and made it push off the other block.

When I initially clamped everything, the seam kept buckling when the clamps were tightened. I replaced the middle stick with a scrap piece of rabbeted pine. This held the basswood down when it tried to buckle.

It actually worked well! The other side needs to be planed, but who cares? I didn't think it would work at all!

In the end, after all the work, I didn't use it.

I realized a problem I would have if I did use this. I'll explain in part 3...

^typo I swear this was a typo. It made me laugh, so I'm keeping it.