Custom Wood Inlay Boxes
Custom Wood Boxes
I love making custom boxes of all kinds. My 30 years of box making experience, and fully equipped shop, replete with my custom made CNC router and joinery machine, allow me to do custom work few would dare attempt. This includes elaborate inlays, carving, relief carving, and all these techniques in combination. Custom wooden boxes can be humble, when one simply needs a finely crafted box built from some beautiful wood of a particular size, to the elaborately decorative, to the many requests I get for things I never would have imagined.
Here's a brief guide and glossary to get you started on commissioning a custom box.
Pictured at left is a custom inlaid jewelry box made as
a coming of age present for the client's daughter. I made
another with it, and it's is
available for sale.
Unicorn Jewelry Box Top Detail
This box is the most elaborate inlay I've ever done. It is a duplicate of a commission I made in 2011. I am somewhat of a pioneer in working with certain CNC inlay techniques -it created quite a stir when I posted the top on the web forum for the CADCAM software I use, Vectric Aspire . Though these days most marquetry, the art of creating pictures from wood veneer in jigsaw puzzle like fashion, is done with laser cutting, there are distinct advantages in using the slower, fussier router based method I use, not the least of which is that I use several times thicker wood, allowing for a finely sanded finish with no fear of sanding through. It also allows the use of species not readily available in veneer, especially black ebony. The width of the strings of the oval ebony knotwork banding is about .025".
Custom Bee Inlay Jewelry Box
For this custom jewelry box the client requested a bumble bee with his wife's initials inlaid into the inside of the box top. This sort of work will ad about $150 to the cost of one of our standard jewelry boxes.
Here's a detail by detail comparison of our custom jewelry boxes to others.
Butterfly Inlay Memento Box
This is a custom made box I made for a client who wanted a box to contain some precious belongings of his deceased wife to give to their daughter for her wedding. There are extensive engravings on the top, and inside the box, with inlaid butterflies on top, and custom fitted openings for a hand mirror and other items.
Inlaid butterflies of ebony, satinwood, and pink ivorywood.
I can make you a box of this complexity starting at around $800.
Koa Cabinet with Dragonfly Inlay
Here's one of my koa jewelry cabinets with a custom dragonfly inlay in ebony, holly, and purpleheart, with black palm end grain eyes. Astounding detail in the inlay makes for a wonderful surprise when the panel is withdrawn from the cabinet. An inlay like this will add about $150 to the cost of a piece, and can be placed onto an otherwise very simple custom box for a total box cost of about $250.
Horse and Rider Inlay Box
This was another production custom inlay project, pushing the envelope of what detail is possible with wood inlay. These are holly in ebony, and the holly really reads a lot like ivory. No other wood combination comes close to the drama of ebony and holly, though other light colored woods in ebony, or other dark woods in holly or maple can be very nice. I can also do silver inlay in ebony for an even more dramatic effect.
These are 3.5" long, so on my screen I'm seeing this photo at over three times actual size. No white filler here -it's actual wood inlay. Boxes of this complexity can be custom made in quantities of a dozen or more for about $100 each.
Were wolfe Box
This box was custom made for a woman who runs a tattoo business with her husband as a gift for him to house his new tools. It's built with a bloodwood case with walnut burl top, inlaid with bloodwood and maple, and carved and painted with faux silver leaf paint.
Client's response:
Special Forces Gun Box
This special custom wood box was built for a client who served in the US Special Forces in Vietnam. He became the holder of an emblematic hand gun from his troop, and felt it deserved an appropriate storage vessel. The client provided the exquisite quilted maple from his native Oregon, and also supplied the unusual gold plated hardware.
The inlay work, shown in the enlargement is at about 1.5 X scale, involves nearly 100 pieces, with ebony, holly, satinwood, baliwood, jatoba and Brazilian tulipwood. This is a great example of the amazing accuracy of the inlay work I can do with my shopbuilt CNC router. It does help to know what you're doing. The CNC only does, at best, what it's told to do.
Inlaid Bicycle Chainwheels box
This special custom wood box was built for an ardent bicyclist, who wanted a box with the pattern of interlaced chainwheels he and his wife have tatooed on their bodies. Not settling for a mere wooden inlay, he sent me actual aluminum chainrings to be fitted into the top of the box I would make him.
The box is koa, with ebony accents. This is another example of the amazing accuracy of the inlay work I can do with my shopbuilt CNC router. This required some puzzle solving both in creating the drawing, and cutting the interlacing chainrings to fit together with precision -the first time.
Silver Inlaid Horse Box
This silver and ebony inlay box was part of a small production run for a client who was looking for special gifts for fellow horse enthusiasts. This required the ability to inlay many tiny pieces of silver into the ebony top with speed as well as precision. Some of the silver lines are as thin as .035"!
This is another example of the amazing accuracy of the inlay work I can do with my shopbuilt CNC router. I can craft both one-of-a-kind and small production batches at surprisingly affordable prices. These boxes were less than $200 each for a batch of a dozen.
Custom Inlaid Serving Tray
This serving tray was custom made for an Illinois man who wanted a special piece to hand down the generations, depicting a backyard cherry tree in full blossom.
The walnut tray holds an inlaid panel of birds-eye maple framing a quilted maple sky around the claro walnut tree with bloodwood blossoms, framed in ebony. This is a great example of the amazing accuracy of the inlay work I can do with my shopbuilt CNC router.
Egyptian Motif Pipe Box
This unusual box was commissioned by a pipe carver to house a set of pipes for a collector. He provided me with all the details, and shape templates. I just had to figure out how to make the thing! The three lids are removable, and all surfaces are veneered. The curved surfaces use commercial veneer to facilitate the required radius, and the tops and inside tops use thick, shopsawn veneer. Species are quilted maple, birds-eye maple, macassar ebony, gabon ebony, and snakewood. The inner oval was made by brickwood stacking the substrate from poplar and machining inside and out with my CNC router, requiring top and bottom matching to get the full 4" depth. The wings were made by bent laminating to a form, and refining the matched curves to glue to the oval with the CNC. The piece is larger than you'd guess from the photo -its about 24" from tip to tip.
