Wooden Pen Box – Part 1…

While I wait for the paint to dry and de-fume in the baby’s room I needed another project to work on because boredom is not something that I do well! I decided to merge a few of my random hobbies together and make a wooden pen box to store my fountain pen collection.

Up until now I’ve used a few old cigar boxes, converted into pen boxes, for storage. I have a couple at home and one on my desk at the office, but I’ve run into a few inconveniences with them. Both of the boxes that I keep at home flip open, and I have them on a short shelf, which means I have to pull them out when I want to get a pen. This isn’t such a big deal, but I end of using the top of them for storage of other things, so I then have to pull them out, take everything off, then open them up. One of them also has a lift out tray to reveal more storage on the bottom, so it ends up being a big ordeal getting access to those pens. Also, as my collection grows, I’ve run into a space issue. I have approximately 45 pens, give or take a few. Some of these I don’t keep in any boxes, I just throw them in a cup, but I’m just about at the capacity limit for my three boxes.

Finally, the real reason for building a new pen box (I don’t actually need one) is I wanted to get back to doing some fine woodworking! The last couple months I’ve been mainly working on the baby’s room, which has been mostly rough construction, so I’ve been anxious to get back to the workbench.  I also want to start to challenge my woodworking skills.

With all that being said, here are some of the design goals for the new pen box:

• Must fit in the existing storage shelf which is 20″ wide x 10″ deep x 4″ high
• Drawers instead of a flip up top
• Capacity for 50 or more pens
• Hand tool use only (nothing against power tools, I have many, but more to see if I could do it)
• Be a challenge!

Here are a few snapshots from my woodworking notebook with some rough sketches:

And a fairly quick Blender render of the box (please ignore the ugly wood texturing!):

To help my ‘hand tool only’ criteria I used pre-surfaced wood.  I chose poplar for the main construction and red oak for the contrasting bits.  Here is my starting pile ready to go!

Next step, make the top and bottom panels…