A box

For the first week we had to create a box out of wood in a specific technique Phil showed during class. We also had to choose our theme for the rest of the semester — I'm going with "Double Trouble"! 👯

As a twin myself, while growing up I was very used to sharing the attention, always being half of a reluctant duo, and more often than not I felt me and my brother were expected to behave in the same way — though we're absolute opposites...

Besides having this emotional connection to this theme, it just feels fun and playful to me and I think it's going to be interesting to work with it.

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Double trouble box

This is the first time I'm working with wood and wasn't sure my idea even made sense when I thought about it (I remember having some toy that worked similarly but could not find a reference). So I made a quick prototype with cardboard and some rope I had at home.

I wanted to create two hollow cubes that are attached from the inside with a stretchy string, so that the tension between them would be enough to hold them together, but you could still take it apart and position each cube on its different faces. Each of the horizontal faces of each cube should also have thin slots for the string to move into while shifting the cubes.

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I then went and got a piece of wood that I could cut into cubes (in retrospective I should have cut into smaller cubes)

After cutting this block of wood into two same-sized cubes, I used the drill press to hollow them:

One of the cubes started to crack a little bit so at this point I was done with the drill press and decided to continue the hollowing with a dremel.

...And it ended up looking like this:

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One note: I think the cubes should have been a bit smaller — the proportions of them with the string feel a bit off. Also, I wanted to have the slits go all the way to the center point of each face but as I was using the band saw to cut them the cubes felt like they might crack or break so I had to stop. I'm just glad it's all in one piece (or two) and works. It's quite nice being able to actually make something I had in mind.