Leonard Cleveland: Turning Lidded Boxes

Leonard began turning wood before he knew that the craft was called "woodturning." His first piece was a lighthouse and his first lathe was a second-hand Shop Smith. He now turns on a Woodfast lathe and a couple of Jet mini lathes. Joe displayed several examples of both his turnings and his carvings.

The object of this demonstration was a lidded ring box. The basic piece had a body with a truncated conical profile and a lid with an hour-glass profile. However, Leonard also demonstrated a square-edge body variant.

Turning the Box Body

Leonard began with an oak blank about 4"×4"×4" in size. He mounted the blank between centers. Leonard prefers the Step-type drive centers. He roughed the blank into a cylinder using a ½" spindle gouge. He doesn't use a spindle roughing gouge when starting with square stock. He used a parting tool to create a spigot on the outboard end then used a skew to cut a dove-tail angle into the spigot to provide a chucking tenon. The piece was then removed from the lathe and remounted in a scroll chuck.

The spindle gouge was again used to create the profile of the body of the box. In this instance, Leonard tapered the piece toward the outboard end creating a truncated cone broad at the base. Leonard used a 2" Forstner-type bit to bore the chamber in the center of the body to finish depth. Scrapers or hollowing tools could be used to refine the inner profile if desired. In this demo Leonard left the chamber cylindrical. At that point, he used a power sander to sand the exterior profile of the box.

The box would normally then be removed from the chuck and remounted using an expansion grip on the inside of the chamber to make the base of the box available for dressing. In this instance, a small crack appeared at the edge of box mouth so Leonard elected to defer this step until later.

Turning the Lid

Leonard used a second blank (4"×4"×2") cut from the same block as the first blank. He marked centers on both faces of the blank and mounted it between centers and turned it to a cylinder as with the first blank. He cut a dove-tail tenon in one face and remounted the piece in a scroll chuck. The spindle gouge was used to create the desired profile for the bottom part of the lid near the exposed face. He then took a careful caliper measurement of the inside diameter of the chamber in the box body. Using the parting tool on the free end of the blank, he cut a short male spigot slightly larger in diameter that the caliper measurement. Using the usual test, cut, and fit sequence Leonard refined the spigot to just fit into the box body. For ring boxes Leonard achieves a fairly soft fit to allow removing the lid with one hand.

With the spigot properly fitted, Leonard used the spindle gouge to create a shallow recess in the face of the lid and decorated it with shallow beads and coves. This inner recess was then hand sanded to finish. With the lid still mounted in the chuck, Leonard fitted the box body onto the lid and supported it with the tail stock using enough pressure to allow the lid to act as a friction drive for the body. He then cut fine accent grooves into the joint and at two positions on the body just below the joint and burned them with a friction-burning wire.

The lid piece was then removed from the chuck and reversed so the chuck gripped the spigot at the bottom of the lid. The profile of the lid was then refined with the spindle gouge. In this case the profile Leonard chose was somewhat hour-glass shaped with a deep cove between two beads with the lower bead larger in diameter than the upper one. Leonard likes to use either a recess or a short finial at the top of the upper bead. This creates either a dish or a spindle on which a ring can be temporarily placed when removed from the hand at the sink. With the desired profile completed the lid is ready for a combination of power and hand sanding to finish.

It was at this point that Leonard returned to the box body to dress the base. Because of the crack in the lip of the box and in the absence of some C/A glue, Leonard mounted the box body in the scroll chuck using a compression grip at one of the accent grooves burned earlier. This left the base of the box free to be dressed. Leonard likes to create a foot about 1/16" high but somewhat smaller in diameter than the outer edge of the base. This makes the box appear to stand slightly suspended above the table. When the foot was completed the base was hand sanded to finish.

Square-edge Variant

Because of the interest in square-edge boxes, Leonard mounted a new blank between centers and demonstrated creating a body with a square-edged flange somewhat above the midpoint of the body. The techniques were basically the same, but in this instance he used an E-Z Rougher to scrape the square stock to two cylindrical segments with an untouched square segment between them. The spindle gouge was then used to clean up the faces of the square-edge segment and to refine the profiles of the round upper and lower segments so they joined cleanly with the faces of the square segment. Leonard chose a body profile that was more spherical so that the square flange resembled a square Saturn ring. With the lathe running he hand sanded the faces of the square flange carefully to avoid finger contact with the spinning corners. The curved segments were power sanded.

A dove-tail tenon was then cut in the end that was to be the bottom of the body and the piece was mounted in a scroll chuck. The Forstner-type bit was then used to bore the center chamber of the box to finish depth as in the first example. However, with the rounded body shape, Leonard chose to use scrapers to round the interior profile of the body. With the interior profile established he would normally use forceps to sand the interior chamber surface to finish. At this point the piece can be reversed on the chuck using an expansion grip in the chamber to leave the base free for dressing as before.

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