Repairing a Prince

Almost a year ago a customer sent a halfmoon box back to me for repair. It had fallen off a shelf and hit the floor, but from the parts I received it looked like it had exploded!

This is what the box looked like when it arrived at my shop last June. Fortunately, all the pieces were there, except for some very small chips.

This is what the box looked like when I made it back in 1999. The body is Indian Tamarind, the front is Wild Tamarind, and the pulls are Prince Wood, all from the Florida Keys. I called it "Prince of the Wild Indians."

When the parts arrived, I couldn't imagine how I was going to put them all back together. Normally, when constructing a halfmoon box there is a step by step sequence that I follow. But, due to the nature of the breakage, many of these parts had to be reassembled at the same time, and in a different order than I would normally do. After thinking about it off and on for almost a year, I finally tackled it a couple of weeks ago.

This is how the inside halves of the body looked. Each of the five shelves was broken in two places.

The first step was to glue each shelf to one half of the body.

Then the two halves of the body were glued together. This was a tricky part.

The bottom front piece, the top front piece and the broken chunk of the body were glued in.

After this, I had to fill in a few places where chips were missing, sand the entire box, oil twice and buff. Here's the finished piece:

Not too bad. What do you think?