Mother's Day Jewellery Box - The Glue-Up

To start this project, I needed wood preferably S4S (Surfaced 4 Sides) as I have no access to tools nor skills required to true and square my own lumber. From memory, I was able to recall a shop which sold what seems to be surfaced wood for woodworking.  I decided to pay this shop a visit.

It turns out this shop, known as Hoctrade Sdn Bhd, carries numerous shapes and sizes of surfaced wood for cabinetry work. Most of their Nyatoh timber stock is however surplus from orders made by customers in advance. This simply meant that one may not find the same shape and size of wood the next visit although an order could be placed for a specific configuration if it is so required. This would be a little more expensive I was told. Despite that Hoctrade is still a haven for beginner level woodworkers like myself. A few visits later, I  had myself a small lumber yard at home of various shapes and sizes.

I decided to make the front, back and sides from 1/2' thick x 2' wide boards glued-up to make 6' wide boards. Also, the 2' wide boards were roughly cut to the individual lengths of the top, bottom and sides before joining instead of attempting to glue 40+' long boards. I had neither the confidence nor enough clamps for the latter task.

Glue-up of the front piece.

Due to the lack of experience, I went ahead and glued-up two 2' wide boards first. After those were dry, I then glued the third piece as shown in the picture above. These steps were repeated for the back and two sides of the box.

The completely glued-up front piece.

I learned from this exercise that a rehearsal, as suggested by numerous other woodworkers, was an absolute necessity. Also, once the two edges were joined, I used my fingers to gauge that the edges were meeting to produce a flush face without minding the glue. This technique was suggested by Christopher Schwarz on either his blog or book. I adjusted the two edges until flush before clamping across the middle. I repeated the same steps before applying clamps across the sides. Only then did I wipe the excess glue off with a damp cloth. After which I clamped over the joined edges to ensure a flush face while the glue sets. These were roughly the steps which I eventually came to while attempting to produce a flush edge-joined board.

The front (left) while the back piece is under clamps.

I would have to agree that one can never have enough clamps but do spend a little more on quality. Its sound investment. A casualty resulted from the glue-up process. These Rolson's were cheaper alternatives to the Irwin clamps bought at Ace Hardware.

Glue-up casualty. Quality does matter.

At the end of the process, I had glued-up all the pieces which I needed for the box. The glued-up edges in all the resultant boards were not as flush as I wanted as I was trying to save myself the effort of planing the boards true. I guess the use of the smoothing plane is inevitable but that would be covered in another post.

The resultant boards after the glue-up.

Notes on Nyatoh timber :

• Foreign sources advice against its use as it is claimed to be irresponsibly harvested. The Malaysian Timber Council however don't seem to have such a stand.
• Warning! Some sites mentioned that certain species of Nyatoh have high silica content which would rapidly blunt cutting edges.