Another two brood boxes

Yet more woodwork in this entry, I might rename the blog Shoddy Carpentry and Me. I recently made some Horseley Boards for swarm control but on their own they're not much use, you also need a spare brood box and a full compliment of frames to go with each. So it was buy more brood boxes or build them myself. As usual I opted to make them myself.

Cutting glued floorboards the hive side size

Last year I was given a load of floorboards which I glued and cut to get the right size for brood box sides. I was cutting 16 sides and didn't feel like doing it by hand so I used the the circular saw that normally lives in the tablesaw housing for that.

16 hive Commecial Hive side sized bits of wood.

I used a few of the side to make up a couple of Nucs earlier. For the joints I just used screws and wood glue. Brood boxes can end up bearing a lot of weight though so I needed to make the joints a bit more robust. Dovetail joints or finger joints are the way forwards. Ideally this could be done with a router and a template but I tried that and just found it confusing so I went back to hand tools. I decided to cut two fingers per side then use glue and screws.

Cutting corners whilst cutting joints.

Previously I've cut the joints one board at a time using pencil marks, whilst my cuts have improved with time there's room for improvement. This time I decided to cut both sides of the corner joint together using a thin saw blade. Clamping two boards at a time onto the workbench and marking the joints I made what would be the horizontal cuts by holding a hacksaw vertically. I marked the edges on the joints A,B, C and D on each box because as I was guaging the cut positions by eye instead of measuring them so each joint would be unique.

More cutting..

The boards were then seperated for the other cuts which I made with the same saw for the outer cuts and a coping saw for the inner ones. I broke a few coping saw blades along the way which wasn't hugely surprising bearing in mind they cost me the princely sum of 19p each.

Test fitting. Looks ok to me.

The floorboard edges have a rebate on the top sides, I used a rabbit/rebate plane to cut off the inner side of the rebate to create a shelf for the frame lugs to sit on. Using a lot of glue on all the mating edges and some long wood screws with predrilled holes I stuck and screwed the sides together. This is normally a real pain unless you have a large collection of big wood clamps but I borrowed another set of hands which made made it a doddle. I added some metal runners saved from the Easipet Supers and gave them a coat of red Shed & Fence Paint. I paint most of my stuff green but these floorboards are quite soft wood and I doubt they'ed stand up well to Winter. Differentiating them with red paint will remind me to swap them out.

Thanks to the existing groove the rebate was too wide.

After filling the boxes with frames I found the rebate for the frame lugs were too wide so the frames could slide too far to one side and fall into the box. I fixed that by gluing and pinning a thin bit of wood into each. Thanks to the free floorboards these brood boxes only cost me a few screws, a couple of batons, a little glue and some paint I already had lying around.

Two more finished brood boxes