A book that you could use as a gift is the American Woodworking Book by John J. Kelly, Jr., William D. Allen, and J.H. Lewis. This is just a sampling, but a solid book about working with wood. Kelly, Allen, and Lewis are an interesting collection because their books deal just as well with cutting wood as they do with the more complicated woodworking. Kelly, in particular, explains woodworking by having you practice on a number of different wood species and working on different ways of working with them. With a different wood species, your tools and equipment are more likely to be different from what you saw in a textbook. The woodworking theory that we’ve learned as children is actually a good guide to working with wood. As you get older, it’s helpful for you to spend time with different wood species and see what they do and what you do to them.
My bookcase is pretty big, so I decided to make a wooden box for my tool chest and a wood wall. These are two things that a lot of people use when they’re trying to hide from the elements. I have a number of different kinds of things I can hide in my garage that I’ve bought out of my bookcase, so the idea is that I can hide all my stuff here and the box will have little holes that will allow me to access my tools.
A wooden box doesn’t look like much without a frame around it. But because it’s so small, I ended up just using a few pieces of sheet metal. I cut them up at one end and then bent the wire inside the box so that it would have the same shape as the rest of the box. If you take a look at woodworking frames, they’re made of a material called grommets, which are flat strips of wood that give a very smooth feel. So when the wood cuts through the material, you get a very flat bottom and you get a smooth finish. The sheet metal frame I made from four pieces of sheet metal, three of each metal strand, one on each side.
One thing the hardware I put in the box does is prevent the wood from coming in contact with all the other stuff I planned to hide in it. So I put a hole in the bottom so that, when I work, a piece of paper might have to poke through the bottom in order to pull loose the fabric I’m making with my clothes, which would cause the whole fabric to fray, so I put holes