Artisan puzzle boxes of craft, curiosity, and concealment

Five wooden boxes of different materials stacked on a surface near a window.
Wooden box with yosegi veneer in a zigzag pattern and the word 'DETOUR' and an arrow engraved on the top pointing to the right.
Wooden pillar top with an inlaid compass rose of cherry and maple in a field of walnut with small brass accents.
Wooden board with the word 'Ludignum' engraved and a small icon of a key inside a square next to the text.

The Detour Box initial run is fully reserved

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I repurposed a damaged Shaper Workstation surface into a clamping jig for gluing the walnut trim on the Detour box side panels. The surface was scarred by a loose router bit, but I kept it knowing it would eventually earn a second life. Clamping sma
The chevron veneer process is now locked in. This step took weeks of design and iteration, and seeing it behave exactly as planned is a huge relief. Onward. #yosegi #puzzlebox #veneers #finewoodworking #bandsaw #parquetry #jig
Sometimes the tool you need doesn’t exist, so you have to invent it. A custom bandsaw jig for slicing thin, uniform veneers from the tanegi blocks—designed for precision and accuracy over speed. I'm able to cut consistent slices less tha
The tanegi blocks (the patterned billets from which veneers are sliced) for the Detour box are now complete. Each tanegi passes through a number of stages: straight out of the clamping jig, drum-sanded flat, and trimmed square, before being assemble
While assembling these chevron rows into a tanegi block, I briefly suspected the pieces were warping from uneven glue absorption. They appeared to curve outward at both the near and far ends. They were perfectly straight. The pattern triggers a cla
A milestone for the Detour Box: all of the individual chevron rows for the exterior veneers are now complete. This stage has taken weeks of steady, methodical work: milling billets, cutting thousands of maple and Cambia poplar pieces, assembling the
Introducing the Detour Box. After many months of work, my latest puzzle box design is ready to share. This prototype features Nokozuku-cut cherry and walnut yosegi veneer that I planed by hand. For the production run, I’ll be switching to Hiki
That’s all the parallelograms cut - I estimate around 2,800 which is a bit more than I need but it’s always important to plan for some amount of defect/loss. Total time spent was a bit over 7 hours over three days! The next step will be
Work is progressing on cutting all the sandwich (dark + light) billets into parallelograms. I need to make about 2,500 of these, and they all need to be nearly identical in dimensions. I'm about halfway done, and so far they are turning out better th
The Sinking Shop Box. This was a one-off box that I created to thematically fit some marquetry I had done. The box is an N-ary puzzle and takes somewhere around 40 moves to open. I created a poem to narrate the solution: The Ballad of the Founderin
I wanted to see if I could emulate v-carving on my Shaper Origin. By breaking my logo down into a LOT of passes, each with a different depth and offset, I achieved some pretty nice results. This might have been much easier with Bench Pilot. #shapero