One of the trickiest things about making a cloth-covered clamshell box happens at the very end when all the pieces finally go together.  You’re applying a fair amount of adhesive to a fairly large surface area and the moisture in it inspires the boards of the case and the trays to want to curve. To suppress this natural tendency and make sure the pieces stick together properly we have to use a lot of weights.

To me this always looks like a miniature city somehow, complete with skyscrapers! We have a bunch of different sizes and types of weights, from small flat lead weights  or bricks wrapped in paper to larger antique cast iron weights whose original purpose is not always clear. To get as much weight as possible spread across the entire surface of the box you end up using a wide variety of these and it can make for quite a skyline.  Here’s an overhead view of the weight city I built today:

weight city