Simple pleasures

I’m an easy guy to please, and some of the simplest woodshop procedures tend to delight me.

The feel of a completed sanding job, the snap of a well-tuned joint locking into place, your first look at the book-matched pattern upon opening up a freshly resawn board – it’s simple pleasures like these that are so satisfying to me when working in the shop.

If I put some thought to it, I could probably come up with a list of a dozen things like this. But for now, let’s consider continuous grain.

Any box or carcase can look great even without paying attention to the grain at the corners. A lot of times, in fact, how the grain runs at corners isn’t important, especially when attention is directed elsewhere in a project by overall design or other details.

But I like making grain a focal point, and box projects are perfect for this. It’s easy to do continuous grain for three corners by making components from a single board and cutting your miters tight without wasting any stock between the mating edges.

Do this and the grain at three of your corners will flow like a river around the project. The fourth corner? Well, orient it to the back and no one will notice. Or you can take a bit more effort to make the continuous grain an infinite loop.

By resawing the stock and cutting the first two adjacent sides from the first half of the resawn board, and the second two adjacent sides from the other – again, being careful with your mitering – the grain at each corner will meet perfectly no matter how the box is sized.

It’s more time-consuming to resaw the four box sides (and you need nice-looking grain to start with) but once done, the infinite-loop effect never fails to make me smile, even when no one else is around.