My predilection is to not show endgrain — as I’ve noted in other discussions here, a fine cabinetmaker who taught me a great deal when I was growing up inculcated in me the opinion, “Endgrain is like a person’s belly button, you know everyone has one, but for the most part, you don’t want to see it, unless it’s someone special.” If I want exposed joinery, well, that’s why I have a collection of dovetail saws:
and we did cover making dovetails here before:
and various other joinery options, e.g., Knapp joints:
There is also already specialty software for this sort of thing (for those folks who have machines/workholding setups for them):
https://g-forcecnc.com/jointcam.html
https://fabrikisto.com/tailmaker-software/
That said, I find a continuous grain/seamless box with no end-grain showing (once of these days I’m going to get a nice bandsaw which will allow re-sawing) far more interesting in most cases:
One additional possibility would be to then modify the box by cutting in grooves and adding splines, but mostly that ends up looking like lipstick on a hog.
So, this evening, I will walk through making a:
- 12" x 8" x 6" (W x L x H) box
- from thicker stock, possibly up to 1/2" — one concern about this technique is it is limited in stock thickness by the size of the tooling selected, another is that wood thickness needs to be proportional to the size of the project, and one doesn’t want a heavy/clunky project (which looks as is if it was made out of lumber pulled off a shelf w/o further thought or processing)
However, you did not specify lid — there are 3 which are pretty easily done:
- sliding
https://cutrocket.com/p/622970cdb482a
- integrally hinged
https://cutrocket.com/p/67b86d0d17056
- externally hinged with hardware (after being cut apart)
just let me know your preference on that and we’ll work through this this evening with my joinery technique — if you still want exposed endgrain you can then either modify the box after making it, or apply what is learned here to implement your own style of joinery.