Well… Yesterday I managed to get the back of the case onto my Dutch tool chest (based on the book Dutch Tool Chests by Megan Fitzpatrick from Lost Art Press), although that took most of the afternoon.
In the video at right, I show the chest with its front, back, and sides installed, and remove the slats that activate the fall-front. You can see the use of the cut nails (from Tremont Nail Company), and the planing of the shiplap at the top back edge of the chest so that the (eventual) lid can fit flush against the top of the chest.
But I made a significant mistake, and I think I also show that. It required me to peel off all the shiplap, knock all the nails out of the boards, and start over again. You can see the final result of this re-start at the very bottom of the backside of the chest, where it’s possible to see a board attached that doesn’t have a tongue slotted into the groove of the board above it.
(Incidentally, those grooves are pointed down, to prevent them from collecting water if the chest is ever outside for any length of time. Thoughtful, really, to arrange them like that, since my chest will have to be outside a lot of the time if I’m working with my tools.)
The basic problem is shown in the first picture in this small gallery. Once I’d attached all the shiplap backing boards, I had maybe 3/4″ left, no more shiplap of the right length, and no place to attach it to the chest carcase. Oops.
I wound up taking all the shiplap off, and starting at the top edge of the chest, and working my way down the back. At the bottom, I was missing about 1″ of length. Fortunately, earlier, I’d cut the groove off the bottom of my bottom piece of shiplap. So there was a flat surface there; and I cut one piece of pine board to match. Voila! Completed back.
I’d hoped to get this far, and then start some “furniture” or systems for housing my tools on the inside of the carcase. But no dice. It took most of the afternoon to get this far, and I futzed around with several different solutions before settling on the one I eventually used. All the same, I’m proud of how far I’ve been able to come on this project. I now have tool storage (almost) adequate to my tool-set, and I’m gradually starting to figure out how to frame up the ‘furniture’ within it to hold more of my tools.
Rex Kreuger, in outfitting his Joiner’s Tool Chest, said, “every small space is an opportunity,” (in a video for his Patreon members) and that’s a worthy thing to remember moving forward from here.
Also, this mother is going to be heavy when fully loaded. My spouse asked me today when I was going to put handles on it, and had I even thought about putting handles on something that’s obviously going to be so heavy?? And the truth is, I have thought of handles, and I’ve even already bought them. But — once they’re installed, it’s going to be a lot harder to paint the chest, and to work on it while it’s resting on its sides. So no handles… for now.
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.
