DIY Mahogany Display box

Finished Product Up Front

So my Mom is selling some products from WildTree and wanted a display box for them so she asked me if I could put something together. The bottles are a forrest green so I thought a red mahogany would look nice to go along with them, I picked up some African Mahogany however it is a lot more light brown than the reddish brown that Genuine Mahogany is. First step was to get the boards to width and plane out any inconsistencies in the glue up, this stuff is a dream to work with.

This is an older project so pictures are again sparse since I just decided to start documenting my builds. I cut the miters and added peg holes for the self using an edge guide on my router and then chamfered all the corners on the inside. I also added a slot for the 1/4" ply I used for the back of the box, you can see that in the photo below too, it's basically just a floating panel. If you do something like this you'll want to stain that back panel before glue up since it'll be hard to get good coverage while it is in place.

That photo was actually because I messed up the holes, one set started 9-1/2" from the top... and one set started 9-1/2" from the bottom...Whoops! Ended up adding more peg holes to even things out, thankfully the spacing worked out.

Glue up was actually just done with painters tape as clamping miters is a royal PITA. I used this method:

 It worked really well. Now miter joints on boxes are basically end grain to end grain and are fairly weak with just glue so most people will use dowels or splines to strengthen them. I decided a bit of brass would work well with the darker wood... I don't have a lathe so I cut pieces of 1/4" brass rod to length and threw them in the chuck of my drill and used progressively higher grit sandpaper until I got the finish I wanted. I also used the same material on the pegs for the shelf, those I went to about 600 grit on everything where the dowels I just went that high on the exposed head.

This is after staining with "Red Mahogany" stain from minwax if I were to do it again I probably would have used dye to get the depth a bit better. Here you can also see one of the dowels in place

After that I just applied about 4 coats of wiping varnish (50/50 poly/mineral spirits) sanding in between coats and making sure I got rid of any drips. Below this is still a bit wet so much higher gloss than the end product.

Here are some glamour shots after finishing everything, it turned out a bit more red red than red-brown so I'll adjust the next project if I ever want to use Mahogany again. It's really hard to capture the luster of this wood the colors really change as the light hits it at different angles, extremely interesting and pretty wood. Overall the piece is a bit "heavy" and probably would have looked a bit better in 1/2" or similar stock