“Easy” way to make a threaded box:  At one of the carving club meetings, a guy brought in a sphere that he had cut in half, hollowed out, and then tried to put threaded PVC pieces into it so make is into a box.  Really cool idea, except he left an uneven gap in the split after the two halves were put back together.  My mentor/friend Bob and I looked at the piece and decided that between the two of us, we could fix that teeny, tiny, little problem.

So this past Saturday, we got the PVC pieces and started in on the project.  We figured it would take one hour – tops – and we’d be done.  Our Saturday session ended four hours later with nothing to really show for our work than a string of obscenities, cobbled together in unique patterns.  Every time we tried to put the lid together, it would either end up with the same crooked crack that the other guy had, or the PVC fitting would come loose and break away from the wood.

Sunday, we decided that we had come too far to quit, so we went back at it.  We finally realized that the reason for the crooked gap was because the lid was that as the threads locked, it would “tilt” the lid to the same angle as the threads.  Closer examination showed that we had set the insert on a little “shelf” we had left in the lid, but since it was sitting on the bottom thread, it was tipping the lid to one side.  We figured out how to set the PVC insert in flat and solved that little problem.  To solve the problem of getting the PVC to stick to the wood, we used  CA glue to glue the insert to the wood, then we used plumber’s epoxy to fill the small space around where the fitting attached to the box lid.  One of those two changes worked and we were able to complete the project.  Not too shabby, considering all we had to go through to make this little buggar!