224 – Jewelry Box with Gary Rogowski

Video - July 17, 2014

I recently had the good fortune of working with Gary Rogowski, a well-known educator and author. If you aren’t familiar with Gary, he wrote Taunton’s Complete Illustrated Guide to Joinery. You know, that little reference book almost every woodworker has in their library? Since Gary was in the area on family business, we decided to spend a couple days together building one of his projects: a jewelry box with a slight Asian influence.

The seemingly simple box serves as an opportunity to work on numerous techniques including finger joints, breadboard ends, sprung joints, dowel reinforcement, and rice paper application. And speaking of finger joints, Gary has a really cool trick for getting accurate and repeatable finger joints at the bandsaw.

With only two short days to work with, we weren’t able to complete the entire box with Gary. But I picked up where he left off and finished it up myself. I didn’t really like the original base so I decided to give mine some small feet. Seems like a good place to put your own spin on such a beautiful box.

This project was documented in Popular Woodworking Issue #190 (June 2011) under the name Jasmine Jewelry Box. You can read text from the article here.

Download the Plans

SketchUp Model (Thanks for improving the SketchUp file Khaled!)

Cut List:

Front/Back – 2 1/4″W x 16 1/8″L x 1/2″T
Sides – 2 1/4″W x 12 1/8″L x 1/2″T
Bottom (1/4″ Ply) – 11 1/2″W x 15 1/2″L (Cut to fit!)
Top – 12″W x 12″L x 1/2″T
Breadboards – 2″W x 12 1/8″L x x 1/2″T
Handle – 1″W x 11″L x 1/4″T
Feet – 3/4″W x 3/4″T x 3/4″L

jewelry-box-corner jewelry-box-closed jewelry-box-open

Products Used

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