Build a Wooden Recipe Box - Great Woodworking Gift Idea

Here's a great project that you can build in your shop. Nice little box, could be used for keepsakes, it could be used for recipe cards, if people still use those. Cool project, people are going to love it as a gift. All the work can be done on your table saw. Here's what's going on.

The box is 10 inches long, six and a quarter inches deep this way, five and a half inches deep this way. We're going to cut a rabbeting joint here on the corner to give it good strength, help everything stay together. Do that with the dado head right here on the saw. Now, one of the things that's really cool, the reason this lid fits so well is we're going to build the whole box, then we're going to cut the lid off. So it has to fit when it's done.

First step, we can rip our parts to width. Again, that width is five and a half inches. I'm working with cherry here. And what I've done on these pieces has made them long enough that each piece will give me a short end and a long front, a short end and a long front. Set my fence to five and a half.

Next step is cross cutting, and I've got some pretty cool little tricks to show you there. To get going on our cross cutting, what I've done is checked my miter gauge to make sure it's cutting perfectly square. And I cut one end of each piece. And then I mark it with an X to make sure I remember which end I cut. Now what we want to do, anytime you're building a box, anything that's got multiple pieces the same size, let's do a technique that lets us get those parts cut exactly the same.

So on the fence, I've got to stop block. That stop block is exactly one inch thick. So when I'm setting the fence to hit this number, to hit my 10-inch length, all I have to do is set the fence to 11. That'll give me a 10-inch piece because we're using the stop block. Now what's cool about this approach is that we can move the fence as far as we need to, to get that multiple length, or whatever length we're trying to produce multiple pieces all cut exactly the same.

So for me, we don't need that big capacity. We just need to be in here and I'm setting my fence to 11, 'cause I got a one inch block. Our miter gauge comes to this side. Now notice a couple of things, have a look at the stop block and I'll point out a few things here. The stop block is above the table.

And that's so that when our material comes over here and kisses it, we don't have an inside corner here where that sought us can build up and prevent us from making good contact. So you want to keep your stop lock up like that. The stop block additionally is in front of the blade. So as I move forward with my cut, then I'm going to lose contact with the stop block, which is important so we don't get binding. This approach works great for those pieces, but I want to show you a different approach for our shorter pieces.

Miter gauge back over here. Now what we're going to do is clamp a fence onto the miter gauge and set up a stop block over here. So let me make a couple of setup changes and then we'll come back and have a look at what's going to happen on this side of the blade. A little bit different approach here. I'm using a stop block still, but in this case what I did is I put an extension fence onto the miter gauge.

The stop block is then clamped to the extension fence distance from the end of the block to the blade is the distance I'm trying to produce multiples of. Now, the way the math works on this, the length of these pieces is five and three quarter inches, that accommodates the rabbet that we're about to cut, to create the joinery. Cross cuttings done, next step dado blade goes in and when I'm going to cut the rabbets to receive those sides. Rabbets are cut, let's talk about how I got there from here. I've got a three-quarter inch dado head in the table saw, set to a height of 3/8ths of an inch.

The fence and a sacrificial fence are set so that the width of the rabbet is just a tiny bit more than the thickness of my side. This will get trimmed off after our glue up is done. That's the easiest way to make that happen. Next thing we need are grooves that will receive the top and the bottom of the box. So dado head is going to stay in, but I'm going to reduce its width to one quarter inch, and then we'll come back and look at those cuts.

I reduced the dado head to a quarter inch. The height is still exactly the same as what it was for our rabbet cut, that's important. Now width of the dado head, here's what that's matching. For my box, I made up a piece of quarter-inch cherry and that's going to make the top and the bottom. You could use plywood, you could also use a contrasting material.

So it'd be interesting with the cherry box to do a maple or a Walnut lid. Introduce a little color contrast. Next step, just a lot of cutting. We're going to do a cut this way. Rotate it, make another cut.

'Cause again, we're cutting for top and bottom. Make extra certain that when you cut your long sides, the rabbets are down. We want all these cuts on the inside of the box. That takes care of feeling groovy. Next step, we're ready to cut those tops and bottoms to size and assemble the box.

We're about ready to glue this baby together, but let's talk about a couple of dimensions. On your top and bottom cut the width so that they're a little bit narrower than the ends; cut the length so that we can fit inside the groove on that end, inside the groove on this end, and everything closes up. Good idea to sand the inside faces of all these pieces before you start putting them together 'cause we can get at them now, we're not going to be able to get to them once we're assembled or not easily, anyway. And then from here it's just yellow glue on each of our rabbets. You really do not need to put glue into those grooves.

Don't forget to put the top and the bottom in because it'll be really hard to do later. All right, now what I like to do is squeeze it this way so that we know that we're closing against the shoulders of the rabbets. Doesn't take a lot of pressure for this. Once the glue is dry on your box, sand these ends flush. Remember that when we cut the rabbets that end grain was sticking out just a little bit.

Before we do the next step, we want those to be evened up. Next step is we cut the top off. And what's so cool about this approach is that because we're taking this top from this box, when we put them back together with hinges, they gotta line up. They can't not line up. On the table saw, what I've done is I've set the height of the blade so it's slightly higher than the thickness of my material.

I've set the fence to an inch and a half, that's the size of our lid, the height of our lid. If you want to change that inch and a half number, you certainly can. Procedure, we're going to do an end to cut, another end cut, then we're going to do the two long grain cuts. I do find it's easiest to make this happen if you stay in the box up and do these cuts first, then go back and do the long cuts. There's another by-product here that's really cool.

In addition to automatically getting a perfect fit between our parts, if you look at the grain on the face and the side and the back and the other side, the grain lines up because we didn't use two separate pieces to make the bottom and the top. Next step here, sand it, finish it, couple hinges on the back, you're going to be set to go. Great little project, easy to make on your table saw in your shop. Great gift to have coming out of your shop.