How I built Companion Cube for my girlfriend

Hello guys!

It's my first entry on Steemit, so I want to say Hi to all of you.

I want to share with you a story about how I built a Companion Cube from the game 'Portal' for my girlfriend. We are both gamers, and when I asked her what she wanted for our anniversary gift, she said just 'do something by yourself'. So, it gave me this insane idea to build that cube as a box suitable to hide something in it.

Here's the original one:

The whole idea was crazy as hell, because I made it out of wood, and I didn't have any experience in woodworking before. I had a lot of fun doing it, didn't cut myself even once (I think it was beginner's luck ;) ) and it came out better than I expected. Take a look.

I had to take a lot of measurements, and by 'a lot' I mean 'A LOT'. I didn't use any of tutorials found on the internet, I wanted to do it from scratch all by myself.

Some more measurements. I had to maintain scale. Project took me about 4 or 5 pages of paper. These two squares were for top and bottom.

I even bought that sawblade especially for this project.

Part of them cut (these were for sides of the box).

Time to grind these rough edges.

After grinding.

Trying to align bottom...

...and top.

Fitting together surprisingly good.

Time to take care of corners.
It also took me some time to measure it properly, because every face of the corner has to had different dimensions.

Corners faces cut...

...and grinded and sorted.

It's starting to actually look like Companion Cube.

Taking measurements for cutting angles.

Angles cut and grinded.

Trying to fit them. They fit like they should, which is nice ;)

Fitting bottom...

...and the rest.

Aaaaand unfortunately, I don't have photos of the final phase - painting and putting it together. But I have some photos of the finished cube.

A few photos earlier you could see the middle circle made of wood, but I decided to make them from the old CDs glued together.

Here's the inside look of the finished Companion Cube, along with other gifts - Dark Souls themed mug, Bioshock: Ininite necklace and Star Wars fanfiction story I wrote. I know the handprint isn't perfect, but I can't draw or paint at all ;P

And here the look of how big it is - me myself for scale.

If you read it till the end - thank you. I put a lot of effort in making this, and I am quite proud of the effect. I know it's not perfect, and I missed some of the details of the original Companion Cube, but - as I mentioned at the beginning - it was my first ever build like this.

Cheers ;)