I made a lot of progress on my Dutch tool chest (DTC) today. It’s glued up and curing, with four clamps on the critical joints and I’ll be able to fuss with it late tomorrow afternoon.

My next steps are to get five nails each, into each end, of the two shelves. Ideally they should be nicely spaced out, with two nails set in maybe 1″ to 1 1/2″ from each edge, and then the other three nicely arranged down the middle of the strip of wood that is the shelf end. This will help make the case work a little more solid, and make it less likely to pull apart with changes in weather and humidity.

• The next step after that is to cut spaces for the latches, and take out a small chunk of the back side of the top shelf
  • Then, framing saws can slide into a slot behind the rack in the back of the case.
• Once that’s done, I can attach a front panel and a lower lip.
  • This will help solidify up the case work on the front side.
  • The front panel will help to define the chamber under the lid where “most frequently used” tools go: bench planes, saws, screwdrivers, marking knives, hammer, marking gauges, etc
• Then I can work on the front drop-panel, which needs a couple of battens and a couple of latch slots.
  • Those will help fix the front of the case in place
  • & close up the lower shelves when I’m not interested in looking at my tools.
• And then I can close up the back of the case.

But I get ahead of myself.

The Day’s Travails

I ended yesterday with ten dovetails cut, pins and tails, and with four dadoes cut for the two shelves. Today was about figuring out how to square up the case and figure out how to cut the shelves to the right length.

This turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.

I cut shelves yesterday, and they were maybe an inch too long, once I had a way to check them against the case. So first I had to trim them to almost the right length, and then adjust verrrrrry carefully so that they were exactly the right length — which meant planing end grain. The forums for Rex Kreuger’s Patreon supporters were very helpful here, particularly Geoffrey, who suggested using a bit of waste or scrap wood as a sacrificial board. Worked a treat.

I also ran into a problem I hadn’t expected to encounter, but it makes sense. I cut these boards to the right size last fall, and then had to move them into the house over the winter so they didn’t warp in the tool shed over the winter. I’ve had that happen numerous times to wood projects, and this time I didn’t want that to happen. So… stored them indoors in the warmth, where they got some additional drying time.

BUT. I’ve been moving them in and out of the house over the last few days, and it’s been a wet spring. I also got my joiner’s cabinetry marks turned around, and switched which board went on the left end of the cabinet and which board went on the right end of the cabinet, and which way the bottom of the chest should be facing. They’re all inside-out: the intended bottom of the DTC is now facing into the interior of the cabinet, and the two side walls’ exteriors are now facing the interior.

This wouldn’t be such a problem… except that usually we arrange these boards in such a way that they warp toward the inside of the cabinet, which tends to pull the boards’ edges more toward the interior of the carcase. This strengthens the joinery and makes the physical case much stronger.

Mine, being turned inside out, will be much weaker.

The weather has also already warped my boards, despite the fact that I had them flat in the autumn. So the process of weakening this DTC has already started. Sigh. The temptation is real: just throw the whole pile on the burn pile and have a bonfire and roast marshmallows.

But this also meant — unexpectedly — that even though I cut my dadoes to a standard 1/4″ depth, because the front and back edge are already cupping… the middle part of the dado is “higher” than the ends where it meets the edge of the board.

So I had to get out the router plane. The hand router plane.

Tuning Tools

I own some pretty nice hand tools, but they’ve suffered from being in storage for most of four years. I got most of them in 2016-2018, and was doing a lot of work with them then, right up into the pandemic in 2020. Then in 2021, we lost our lease, and I had to pack all the tools in a box, and store the box in the shed of our new house.

A shed, no matter how air- and moisture- tight the box, is not a good place for a lot of delicate fancy hand tools. There were rust stains on my router plane.

So one of my first tasks was to get out some steel wool and get most of the rust off the sole of the router plane, and then off the sides of my jack plane, and then off the sides and sole of my block plain. Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to a wire brush. But I did get a rust stain on the inside of my casework, when I routed out the four dadoes, and the rusted places scraped up the interior of the case, too.

But now my shelves fit.

I thought about busting out the automatic sander to get rid of the rust stains and the scrapes on the inside of the DTC. But I thought No, I think I’ll leave them. Because now they’ll be a reminder that if you let your expensive tools rust, you’ll have to clean them in order to create quality work. And it’s better to spend your time working on making things, than on repairing tools you never use.

Shelf Trim & Glue up

I didn’t get any photographs of the glue-up… because when you’re gluing up a project with only your own two hands, you have a limited amount of time to close up the case before the glue dries too much. So I sized the end grain (this means putting glue on the end grain inside the dove tails), waited a few minutes, and then put the glue into the dovetails and the pins, and got the shelves into place, and clamped it up.

Everything came together. I think. We’ll see tomorrow.

It sat outside under the overhang of our porch until evening, but we’re expecting to get rain overnight, so I brought it into the office in the basement to finish curing until tomorrow afternoon. There’s a budget discussion event tomorrow, in anticipation of the upcoming town meeting, and by the time I get home from that I should be able to drive the nails to help hold the case together.

In many ways, getting to this point of the project was the thing that was most frightening to me. It’s not, as they say, all downhill from here. But with the major joinery and casework done, a lot of what’s left is shaping boards by sawing and planing to fit this case, with all its flaws and opportunities. And that means that it’s largely a matter of continuing to plug away at it, day by day and week by week, until I can actually store tools in it.

The Existing Tool Chest

Why go to the trouble of building a Dutch Tool Chest at all, of course should be asked. And the answer is simple. My existing tool collection has outgrown the available space. I built this six-board chest a few summers ago, and it’s terrible (this is the project where I learned how important it is to flatten boards before you work them into a project, and why you need hand planes to do that). But it’s workable enough, and it’s done what I needed it to do since 2016, which is hold my tools.

But now there are tools on the floor around the six-board chest. There are tools inside a till and a tool rack inside the chest. There are tools on the bottom of the six board chest. And there are still tools (rusting) in the shed in the yard. Enough is enough.

I looked at the Anarchist’s Tool Chest from Christopher Schwarz, and at some point my skills and furniture making abilities, and workshop system (clamps, workbench, saw benches, saw bent, etc) will be able to approach the skill-set necessary to turn out a tool chest. AND I’ll have a place to store it. (I feel the same way about a Studley-style wall cabinet. Looks awesome… my skills and storage capacities for such a thing are currently 404 – not available.