Yesterday, I glued up two boards to make a panel about 14 inches high. Today I planed it flat, attached four channel locks for the slats that lock the fall front closed, and two battens.
Oh, and I used another plane, one with a fence, to raise a panel. Meghan Fitzpatrick (author of Dutch Tool Chests) is correct, though: you’re not raising a panel, so much as lowering the edges. Eventually, I would like to decorate that front panel with some of the decorative techniques from Chris Schwarz’s book American Peasant. First though I will have to paint the chest. And do that I’m going to have to wait until the chest is complete.
In some ways, it’s not too far off. Tomorrow or Friday I will be able to attach the backing boards. I will have to glue up a lid, but I no longer fear that process. I am more concerned about the “bread board ends“ of the lid — which seems to involve making a mortise in a long stretch of hardwood like oak.
The harder thing is the interior furniture of the chest: a board drilled through with holes to hold screwdrivers and marking knives and gauges — wooden blocks cut with slots to hold saws upright and in easy reach — or similar blocks on the underside of the lid, with turnbuckles to hold or release them. Maybe some small drawers, to hold specific tools that might get easily lost otherwise?
The chest has held a lot of of my tools in a very hugger-mugger state all summer long. But today was the first day that I could set my planes in the bottom of the chest, arrange the saws in a sort of loose “till arrangement” behind them, the saw blades lined up vertically. Once the back of the chest is in place, there will be places for all the screwdrivers and small hand tools…. I’m excited for the future options these open up!
Among the things I discovered as I unpacked the chest to figure out the fall front, was all of my sharpening stones. It’s become clear that I need to become a better sharpener than I currently am. That’s going to require building some kind of a sharpening station. I’m guessing that this will be my next workshop project.
The next one after that, is a “nail cabinet.“ I have a good design from a Chris Schwarz article based on the Roy Underhill nail cabinet — from the Woodwright’s Shop TV show on PBS.
Part of me feels bad for spending so much time and energy on building the shop furniture for a shop I don’t yet own. I work in the open air under my house’s deck, and at the moment a shop or a shed devoted to woodworking seems unlikely. On the other hand, having the right tools at hand, and the right infrastructure to work with those tools, is an essential part of being a successful worker in any craft. And so I keep building out the tool kit: tool chest, work bench, saw benches, shaving horse, saw horses… all that came first — next comes the nail cabinet, and then a work table, and then maybe a lathe. And then it might be time to rebuild some of the things I’ve already built, or to go on to some new projects, things for inside the house.
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.
