Gentleman’s Valet Box Paper Plan

The original version of this box belonged to my late father-in-law, Wilbur Rader. I suspect it came from a department store in Allentown, Pennsylvania, circa 1950. While my wife loves it for its sentimental value, it is not particularly well made. So when I set out to make copies for his three grandsons, I took a few liberties with the construction to make the new boxes more durable than the original, which was essentially just nailed together.
The star feature of this box is its curved lid. On the original it’s a bent piece of plywood, but I made mine from solid 8/4 stock that I coved on the tablesaw. Cove-cutting on the tablesaw involves running your workpiece at an angle across the blade to create a curved cut. As explained in the article on page 28 , varying the angle of approach allows you to control the amount and shape of the curve. However, the setup for coving this box is dead simple.You need only to set up a pair of auxiliary parallel fences that are perpendicular to the blade–no other calculations are needed.
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