I’m always a little disappointed in my woodworking skills relative to my other creative efforts, like drawing or writing. But then, I remember that it’s the skill-set I’ve taken up most recently, and that I have much less time to work on developing because I have an outdoor “woodshop” rather than an indoor one. It’s too hot outside in the summer, and too cold in the winter, to work with a lot of sharp metal tools with sweat pouring down my face or my hands frozen. So spring and autumn are my time to work with wood.
As a consequence of that, I rarely give myself over to working with hardwoods or anything that requires that I spend vast sums of money. That tends to mean that I work with common pine boards from our local hardware store rather than with fancy stuff from a specialty lumber yard.
I did buy fancy hardware for this Dutch Tool Chest (DTC) that I’m working on, based on the book from Lost Art Press, Dutch Tool Chests by Megan Fitzpatrick (instagram link).
Today I assembled the parts for the mobile base. I looked at how tall Megan said to build it, and tried to estimate how tall that chest would be for me, once I added on the wheels and so on… and I thought, “I could make it higher than that!” This allowed me to include an interior shelf, which I think was a good addition to the chest.
In these two photos you can see that I’ve made the locks, and installed the front boards of the chest; and that the chest fits nicely on top of the mobile base. I still have to add the backing boards, but that has to wait until I’ve made the lid of the chest, and the fall-front. And that’s … going to take some time. I’ve not been particularly successful at edge to edge glue-ups before. It’s one of those particularly tricky (for me) operations that is challenging. I did try earlier this spring, but didn’t get very far. I’ll have to try again later, before it gets too hot out.
On the other hand, having the base finished is a huge improvement. My old six-board chest is looking a little more empty now, which means that I don’t have to move a dozen sharp tools out of the way while looking for the one thing that I need. All the smaller tools are resting in temporary spots in the DTC or its mobile base, which shortens the number of steps I need to take from outside workshop to inside tool storage, and makes it easier to find what I’m looking for. I’ll be even happier when everything has a place inside the DTC where it obviously belongs.
Although… I have realized that, now that I have the mobile base completed, that I want/need to put the handles onto the upper part of the chest, so I can carry it outside or move the whole thing into the closet when it’s winter and I don’t need fast-and-ready access to the woodworking tools. I mean, yes, it has the mobile base, but… being able to carry everything outside?? That would be a massive improvement.
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.
