Box for Carving Chisels

It has been almost two years since I became the new caretaker of Orvil Heft's tools.  Among those tools were these carving chisels.  Orvil carved birds and painted them so lifelike it was incredible.  Recently I took the time to sharpen every one of the chisels.

Orvil's carving tools: Western tools left, Japanese right

They came in this old shoe box

Finally I'm going to give the chisels a better home.  Recently Paul Sellers put out a series of videos of making a desktop organizer.  I used that design, but changed the dimensions to suit my needs.  I have no in-process construction photos (some details are at the end), but since this is for carving chisels I thought I'd try some carving on the top of the box.  I used some scrap wood for a first pass.

Found a font that I liked and printed words on regular printer paper, then cut the letters out with a knife

I used the paper as a template to draw the letters onto a piece of redwood.  I used the smaller Japanese carving tools to form the letters.

Not too shabby for a first attempt, but this took a long time

My wife and her daughter use a device called a "Cricut" to make things for scrapbooking.  It's basically a printer that has a blade instead of ink, sort of like a mini-CNC machine for paper.  Anyway, you place the paper on a platform and ask it to print your text (or picture, or whatever).  And it accepts different thicknesses of paper - in this case, I used card stock for my template.

From the Cricut on card stock

Taped the template to the box lid and drew the outlines

Ready to carve

This was very slow going and my cuts are not nearly as polished as good carvers' work.

Half way through

And finished

Here's the lid in place

The box has an upper compartment for the larger chisels ...

... and a lower drawer for the small Japanese chisels

The box is made from redwood that formerly was a deck or a fence

Dovetails came out nice

I had sworn not to buy cheap hardware store hinges again, but I didn't want the expense of Brusso hinges for this box.  Hoping to find something in between the two, I called Lee Valley and asked if their small box hinges were any better than the cheap crap at the hardware store and I was assured they were well-made.  When they arrived, I found they were no better (probably exactly the same) as the hardware store hinges.  So I ended up getting a larger size from the hardware store and they seem to be working fine.

Anyway, I'm glad I finally have a permanent home for Orvil's carving tools.  They deserve better than an old shoe box.

Side note: that old shoe box was a "Lazy Bones" brand of shoes that was for little girls and was probably from the 60's.  It's possible that the box has some collectible value to someone.  It's not in pristine condition, but it's not falling apart either - just a little dirty.  And inside was a small informational brochure in perfect shape.  If any of you know more about this and would like to have it, I'd be happy to ship it to you.  Just send me a message on the "contact me" gadget.