Found a piece of mahogany about 2" x 4" x 30" in my wood storage and decided to make some hexagonal boxes.  I read about these again recently in a vintage FWW article by Jim Cummings and I have a (VCR) video of the same era on the same.    So I re-sawed the wood about 7/16 thick and beveled the edges.  Then cut each strip into 6 pieces, avoiding a giant knot.  Five on one side of the knot and the sixth on the other.

 

Then to make a plywood bottom.  I channeled my Jr. High math class to use compass and straight edge to map it out.   Then cut dados that are 3/16" deep and 5mm wide with a 1/8" blade.   Laid out the inserts for the bottom and cut on my recent adjustable angle sliding cutoff table.

 

Tomorrow, I'll be sanding the inside surfaces and doing the glue up.    Haven't decided on a lid, if any, yet.

 

Edited February 25, 20215 yr by kmealy

Looks like you nailed the angles on the beveled edges! Really tight joints.

I got a digital angle gauge for Xmas.  Put it on the table top, zero it out, then on the saw blade.  Measures in 0.1 degrees.   Just to be sure, I ran a sample with some scrap 2x4.

Really like those boxes.

My wife saw these and said that if she thought she would be knitting more than her current just getting rid of yarn, she'd have me make a box to store various sizes of needles.  Sort of like a honeycomb pattern of tessellating hexagons.  She decided it could wait.

Searching the wood pile for something for the lids.  Looked thru and rejected a lot of stuff -- wormy soft maple, QS red oak, lyptus, etc.  Finally found a cutoff of curly maple that someone used for muzzle loader stock.   Resawed, jointed, planed, and bookmatch glued.   I think this will work well.