Sgian Dubh Presentation Box

**ehiker** · 20th December 08, 10:42 PM

Today I finished and shipped out my latest project, a sgian dubh presentation box.

The main wood used in this box is reclaimed white oak from an old house my brother and I dismantled on the family farm. I try to keep some of the old nail holes intact in the finished piece - you can see them in the sides and the lid in this case.

The black wood is also reclaimed, in a manner of speaking. It is bog oak. The bog oak I used in this particular piece comes from Londinium, or modern-day London. It can from old piers built by the Romans; when the Thames shifted course, the piers ended up buried in a bog-like substance that caused a similar reaction (complete preservation of the integrity of the wood and a chemical reaction with the tanic acid in the oak that turned it to a rich black color).

Bog oak is hard to come by, and the cost to ship it over from the UK is heart-wrenching, so I use it sparingly and I save every scrap over an inch long.

This is the first box I've made with the tartan lining. I was able to get some Universal tartan swatches from Kathy Lare at a reasonable price, but in this case, the client had some of his family tartan (Ross), so I used that, instead.

The finish is several coats of shellac, rubbed out with Renaissance wax.

I'm terribly pleased with the final result, though I was on a bit of a time-crunch and so I couldn't do as many embellishments as I wanted, like a bit of bog oak inlaid into the lid. Still, with the limited shop time available to me at this time of year, I'm happy with what I was able to make.

This presentation box will be for a Rab Gordon sgian dubh, by the way, which makes this my third Rab Gordon sgian dubh presentation box.

(Oh, the client only gave me the dimensions I would need to work with for the box; the sgian dubh in the second picture is actually my personal Rab Gordon sgian dubh. For anyone interested, the background tartan is Ancient Campbell.)