Today was a relatively light day. I cut the slots for the lockbars on the drop-front (these will be winding sticks, when the time comes — because I need winding sticks for future projects, and because I need more practice at flattening boards). And I made two of the three “fronts” or panels that go on the front of the carcase, and installed them on the sidewalls and shelves of the carcase.
This involved a lot of cross-cutting of boards to length (against the grain), and some to width (with the grain, or rip-cutting). I’m a much better cross-cutter than rip-cutter. And it’s better for me to set up a plane and shave my boards down from an over-wide width achieved with a rip-cut.
The upper front panel has its top line shaved down at about a 30° angle, matching the line of the carcase sidewalls. The lower front panel should have a bead line on it (get thee behind me, Megan Fitzpatrick, tempting me to ogee planes and beading planes before I’ve built a tool chest!), but I just put a chamfer (or 45° angle).
Everything is nailed in place with cut nails made by the oldest nail factory in North America. I wanted to use heavy nails with decorative rose-heads… but I put them someplace safe and now I can’t find them. So, cut nails. It still makes it look and feel historical.
In a sense, it is historical. At some point, biographers may write “By mid-May of 2025, Andrew B. Watt finished this Dutch tool chest and filled it with these hand tools, which he used for almost all his other known woodworking projects until his death in… xxxx. Of course, we know almost nothing else about this artisan because of the…” and here the manuscript of some PhD thesis breaks off, rat-eaten or whatever.
Next Tasks
My next task is the construction of the drop front. This is a two-board construction; they’re glued together and then cut to fit between the bottom of the upper front and the top of the lower feont. There are battens, or hefty hardwood boards, glued and screwed to the back of the drop front, that drop behind the lower edge of the lower feont. There are also blocks that have slots in them, that match the slots on the front edge of all the shelves— so when the drawer locks are in place, the battens hold the drop front up, and the drawer locks dropped in from the top compartment hold the drop front in.
I also have to construct the lid. The lid is going to have to be about 17” deep, and about 28” long, with hardware hinges and battens to keep out dust and keep it aligned with the top of the chest.
There’s more joinery in these projects, including a construction called a breadboard end on each end of the lid, and I also have to work up the drop front with panel style cutting. What is panel style cutting? Look at your kitchen cabinets, raised in the middle and thin on the edges? That’s a panel.
And all of those battens and lock-parts mean I have to/ get to do some of my first working in hardwood.
Again, I get ahead of myself.
Tomorrow, a drop front. Because once I have that, I can start adding the back boards, and actually use my tool chest as a tool chest. A lid can come in due time.
Previous woodworking?
This part is copy pasted from a previous article on woodworking, and periodically revised to account for my ongoing efforts.
This is a guide to previous woodworking projects, and how I’ve been growing my hobbyist set-up, and learning the skills I want to have as a woodworker. I hope you’ll follow along with this journey as I work out the next step in the development of my woodworking set-up.
my current setup (2021-2025) consists of a low Roman-style workbench, a six-board chest for a tool chest that I’m gradually replacing with a Dutch-style slant-top toolchest on a wheeled base, a saw bench and a saw bent for cutting up lumber into parts, and a kit that mostly consists of European and American style hand-tools.
I’ve thought long about tool chests and woodworking efforts and spaces as part of my design work and magical practices, thanks to Christopher Schwarz’s incomparable book, The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. Far from being a guide to bomb-making or overthrowing capitalism, it’s a guide to the tools and techniques of hand-tool woodworkers in Europe from the 1600s through 1800s.
I reviewed the companion volume, The Anarchist’s Design Book, back in 2016 in the midst of some hoopla about a Gordon White book in the occult blogosphere of the time. A short while later, my life exploded to my profound regret, and I lost my woodworking space and opportunities for quite some time, until Schwarz came out with Ingenious Mechanicks, which Rex Kreuger simplified for me a bit, and I built my own Roman-style low or seated woodworking bench. Given how I live, though, and my tendency to pile stuff on any horizontal surface, I figured the Dutch Tool Chest design offered by Megan Fitzpatrick and recorded in her book Dutch Tool Chests from Lost Art Press would be a better fit for me and my woodworking hobbies and habits.
I think I started it the year before the pandemic in 2019, and then finished it in the summer of 2020. Then we moved again, in early 2021, and I was suddenly stuck.
And then I left off of woodworking for a while until I made this saw bench and saw-bent last year, and made a till for my first (badly made) six-board chest. From those projects, I learned a few things about cutting bridle joints and making mortises and tenons… and realized that I now had too many tools to fit in that six-board chest.
