Make Your Own Bandsaw Box

1. Select Your Wood Blank

When you’re creating a bandsaw box, the first step is to find the wood blank that will accommodate the size of box you want to create. Kyle chose a 3" x 3" x 12" Marblewood blank. The pronounced grain pattern and compact size were perfect to create the look Kyle was attempting to achieve. If your blank has a wax protective coating, Kyle recommends removing the wax before starting. This will prevent the wax from clogging up your sandpaper. You can remove the wax with a card scraper. After removing the wax with a scraper, Kyle cut his blank to 6", the final height of his box design.

2. Layout Your Design

This is where the rubber meets the road. You’ll want to come up with an overall shape for your bandsaw box. Kyle knew that he wanted to add small drawers to his box, so on a piece of cardstock, Kyle drew the profile of his box and included cutouts for the drawers. This template was traced onto his 6” blank.

3. Set Up Your Bandsaw

Bandsaw boxes often require tight detailed cuts, so you’ll need to ensure that you have the proper blade attached to your bandsaw before you start. Kyle Camp prefers a 1/8" blade when creating his boxes. The smaller size allows the bandsaw to make smaller curving cuts without putting binding stress on the blade. And as always, you want to be as safe as possible in the shop, so use proper eye protection and always follow your bandsaw manufacturer’s directions.

4. Start With the Base

Depending on the complexity of your bandsaw box design, you may need to make more than 1 cut to shape your base. Kyle’s design calls for 4 small legs. This meant that he’d have to make 2 distinct cuts. One to create 2 front and back large legs and then a second that cut those 2 legs into the 4 individual legs. You can see in the photos below that his 2 cuts made quick work of creating the legs.

5. Cutting the Sides

Because Kyle wanted to add 2 small drawers to his box, the next step for his project was cutting the length of the box’s sides. When cutting the sides, it’s important to not cut all of the way through removing the sides from the blank on your first 2 cuts. Leave a little bit of wood at the end of your cut so that the blank stays intact. Rotate the blank 90 degrees, and cut the other 2 side all of the way through.

6. Cutting the Top

Kyle’s design has a graceful curved top. After cutting the sides, he cut the sweeping top which also served to cut the remaining 2 sides from the blank. Don’t worry! These will all be glued back on after the drawers are cut.

7. Making the Drawers

As you can see in the photos below, cutting out the drawers is a simple matter of starting the cuts on one side of the box and removing the drawer blank. Once the drawer blank was separated, Kyle created the drawer shape by cutting the face first, then the bottom and then the inside of the drawer (leaving the sides). Each drawer can then be glued back together, leaving out the “guts” of the interior.

8. Gluing the Box

Glue-up is almost like assembling a jigsaw puzzle – only instead, you are rebuilding the box. Take care to match your wood grain. It’s a good idea to have plenty of small clamps on hand to make the assembly go quicker. Spring clamps and hand screw clamps are great for this purpose, but small F-style clamps or pistol grip clamps would work as well. Let the parallel clamps take the night off . . . unless you’re building a huge box!