Flower Box

  Yesterday my friend David came to my shop with the detailed design of a planter box for their front porch.

  I like building projects for David and his wife.  She always provides a very detailed and useful plan for their projects. 

 We began this project with four 2x3 by eight feet.  We cut the 2x3's into 1 1/4 inch square boards on the table saw.  My table saw acted up again and the ripping of the boards was finished on the band saw.  This time the table saw's troubles became obvious, the wire in the plug end had shorted and burned. Today I replaced the plug and the saw is fine. 

 Anyway, I joined two edges of the 2x3s and ripped the boards to size and used my sliding mitre saw to cut the pieces to length. With a well drawn plan it is easy to create a cut list and prepare the material for assembly.

 

one side screwed together.

  The project is going to be painted black so all the joints are butt joints, held together with 2 1/2 screws and glue.  This is quick and easy project.  Another thing that makes the project easy is having David's pair of hands. Usually I work alone and everything  has to be clamped while I work. With help the entire project took less time and needed no clamping. Those extra hands(apprentices) were the back bone of traditional shops. Machines are good, good people are better.

 The off cuts of the 2x3s were kept and used in three different places on this project.

  The short side connecting pieces were ten inches long and rather than cut into another long board we glued two of the off cuts together to make a wide enough board. We glued and nailed the boards together and  screwed the planter together.

  We opted for vertical slats to match the vertical lines on their porch.  The slats on the side and bottom are the off cuts from ripping the 2x3s in the first place. The back of the planter is to be against a wrought wire railing so it didn't need slats. It took David and I and a couple of hours to built the unit. It went home to be finished: sanding and painting will probably take as long or longer than  building.

  I was thinking of this project with hand tools.  It would have taken as long to prepare the materials as it did to build the whole project. I guess we would have bought 2x2 lumber instead of 2x3 construction lumber to reduce the amount of time spent ripping the material and maybe changed the design making the upright slats heavier. It could be done.  If I were making this project by hand I would have used nicer lumber, used dowels or floating tenons as fasteners and used stain and varnish for a finish. A cedar planter box could be pretty nice....

cheers, ianw