Walnut Bread Box

December 2020

This was a personal project of mine that I wanted to do while I was home over the winter break between quarters. My father does a fair amount of woodworking as a hobby and relied on his experience for specific manufacturing and assembly techniques for the bread box.

Aside from the door, bread box is made purely from walnut hardwood. We had two boards of 3/4” x 7” and 3/4” x 9” boards of walnut leftover from previous projects. Walnut is considered a close-grained wood and does not have a strong scent, making a perfect food-safe wood to use. That said, using whole hardwood boards in place of softer plywood added a few more challenges to the manufacturing process. But I am very satisfied with my bread box as a manufacturing project and am making great use of it.

Initial Designs

When I first designed the breadbox in SolidWorks, I actually imagined using 1/2” thick maple plywood primarily. The idea here was that maple is also a fairly hard and closed-grain wood, which is part of the reason it often complements walnut in cutting boards and other items (aside from the color contrast). Plywood came to mind instead of boards as it would be a much easier manufacturing process. The plywood would be already plane, and thinner boards would allow for more space on the inside of the box.

However, I knew that the overall aesthetic would be much nicer and full of character if I used whole boards instead - which is when my father reminded me that we had two leftover walnut boards from previous projects. We decided to use those instead (also saving us about $30 in materials) and got to work.

 Manufacturing and Assembly

While I did not document every step, I photographed several steps of the process we went through to build this bread box.

(Details to be added later.)