In detail, the process I used to create this frame was first joining a longer piece with a smaller piece and doing this twice. I then joined these two pieces to form the frame. Although it sounds simple in theory, for some reason there was a 0.25″ gap left between the two pieces. I quickly solved this problem, however, when I made use of my woodworking training and used the band saw to create as straight a cut as I could. It wasn’t perfectly straight, and later experience with the jigsaw made me realize in hindsight that it probably would have been better to use that instead of the band saw for the purposes of straightness of cuts(or not, since my first time using it was kind of a mess, more on that later).

Repeating this process, I created the second frame, which is the first frame I ran into the issue just described. I purposely left the third frame unassambled at this stage because I realized it would be much easier to use the router, spindle sander, and sandpaper to smooth out the edges after I cut out my handle.

Now we run into the most difficult part of this project: cutting out the handle. I wanted to find a quick solution, so the simplest one I could think of that I had already used was the band saw. Of course, this was a bad idea. The curve I traced out had a very steep angle at its edges, and we all know the band saw can’t handle steep angled-cuts. I learned this the hard way because I forgot about it, and I tried making several straight cuts from the edge of the wood onto the curve, as is typically done, but that was not enough. I took a break and came back with a fresh perspective. As alluded to before, it was time to use the jigsaw. I immediately ran into a major issue: the clamps weren’t strong enough to hold the wood down, and I could only hold it by the edge. Instead of using quick-grip clamps, I opted for C-clamps. This was a much better solution. However, now the jigsaw wanted to move my entire body and the table, and the force was quite overwhelming. This meant I had to find another table that I could securely clamp the wood onto, and I eventually found one. At this point, cutting with the jigsaw was really smooth. I saw firsthand how much better it was a cutting a curved edge than the bandsaw. An issue that remained was that, in order to get enough clamping force, I would have to clamp the wood in a region that has a lot of area, so I would only be able to cut out half of the handle at a time. I solved this problem simply by clamping the other side and cutting the other half, meeting the previous cut halfway. It was quite difficult to make each half of the cut the same so that the cutout would be symmetric. I got around this problem by leveraging the same principles as creating the box of indeterminate size: I determined that I still had more space I could cut out, and I cut out some more so that the handle looked symmetric.

With the handles finished, I could once again do post-processing. I used the oscillating spindle sander to sand the inside of the handles. I then used the hand router with a different bit to round off the edges. It was a bit awkward finding a proper position for the wood to do this. I positioned the wood with one handle flat on the table so that I could use the router vertically. In doing this, the quick grip clamps got in the way at times, but I was able to complete the routing on the outer edge of the handles. For the inner edges I had to position the frame in the orientation it would be when the box is finished. I then used 120 grit sandpaper to sand the edges; they were quite sharp before doing this.

After all of this, here is the finished frame with the handles: