Background: This box was designed in my introduction to furniture design class. In order to practice the skills taught in the class we were to design a reliquary for something of importance in our lives. The project itself was very open ended and only required that the reliquary featured a lid/drawer and incorporated either box joints or miter joints. I chose to build a box to house my postcard collection.

Design: When designing this box I first wanted one large box similar in style to many silverware boxes. It would have one pull out drawer that would house flat 11×17″ maps. Above the lid would be hinged upwards to reveal a compartment for both postcards and standard size park maps. I have always loved the contrast between walnut and maple so chose to have walnut sides with maple splines and lid. I was going to laser engrave the lid with a topographical map of the whites which is where I first truly fell in love with hiking.

Revisiting the Design: After the wood was purchased, milled and cut the rough length I laid out the box. At this point I knew the dimensions were large but didn’t recognize the true size of this box until seeing it sized out in front of me. At this point I revisited the drawing board. I realized what I was really looking for was a place to hold my maps for hiking and postcards. The size was really dictated by wanted to have a drawer for 11×17″ maps, which made for the large footprint and added ~3″ to the height. I decided to instead of make one massive box to make 2 smaller boxes, one for post cards and one for maps.

Build: The two boxes measured 11.5x7x5.5″ for the maps and 6x8x5.5″ for the postcards. The sides were made from 0.75″ walnut that was mitered with maple splines. The lids rest on the box with a simple lip cut into both the lid and box. Both were laser engraved using the laser cutter in the on campus maker space. 3 coats of Danish oil were used as a finish. Rendering of the images was done using a MatLab script.

Date: Fall 2018