Now that the carcase is done, and now that I have some sense of how to glue up boards so they don’t fail, it was time to get started on the lid yesterday. This began with planing two boards flat and square on one edge so that I could glue them to each other. That generated some beautiful curls of shavings from the pine board. Later on, while making the battens for the chest lid, I produced more shavings of oak, which are dark and thicker.
But I get ahead of myself.
First I cut two boards to 29 1/4″ — the width of the chest, plus an inch plus a scooch on both ends. The chest is 27″ wide, so this will be enough room to attach the battens to the end of the lid. The battens will help keep the lid flat, and also help keep dust and moisture out of the case (though not completely). I had to plane these boards a bit on edge, in order to mate them; I sanded the edges after planing to give some “tooth” for the glue to grab hold, and then clamped the boards with my homemade clamps (from 2015! Still working fine!)
Once the glue has set and dried, tomorrow afternoon I’ll take the jackplane to the board and flatten it a bit before attaching my battens to the ends of the board. I might have to do some sanding down at the ends, too. With any luck, I’ll also be able to attach hinges tomorrow.
In any case, once the glue was set and drying, I got to work on rip-cutting (sawing down the grain) and cross-cutting (sawing against the grain) two pieces of oak for my battens. Oak, and hardwood in general, is more rigid than softwood, and these battens will help keep the lid of the chest flat and square despite changes in moisture and the seasons. I planed them until they were flat and square in two directions, and they’re (probably) ready for installation tomorrow, too. I’ll have to drill countersinks and then pilot holes for either nails or screws. The book says to use rose-head cut nails for decorative purposes, and clinch/clench them… but then admits that this is kind of an advanced technique, and that maybe you shouldn’t do this on your first try. I also don’t have 3″ rose-head cut nails on hand, and winter is coming. If I have a hope of getting this chest finished, painted and fitted before first snows, I’m going to have to use screws instead of nails for this part.
The battens are 17″ long. If I put screws in, I’ll need three. The first two will go in at the ends, 1″ from the end of each batten (with a countersink). The middle one … should probably go at the golden mean point, which would be φ = 1.618. If the whole section is 15″ long (17″ – 1″ at each end = 15″), then 0.618 of 15″ = 9.27″. 9.27 converts to either 9 1/4 inches, or 9 17/32ths, inches or 9 9/64ths inches. I think I’ll go with 9 and a quarter inches as my golden mean point.
Maybe I should get brass screws.
It looks like I should be trying for 1 1/2″ long screws, to hold the battens to the chest lid. I think I have some of those in my shop resources — but I’ll have to dig through a lot of nails and screws and washers to find them… gosh, it’s almost like I should build a Nail Cabinet next. Four sets of dovetails at the corners, backing board, squared-up joints, and 21 drawers…. a suitable next challenge.
One of the things Chris Schwarz talks about in American Peasant is Good Work, At Speed. Do your best work, at a fast pace in order to improve both your speed and quality. There’s something in there which Schwarz doesn’t say but which is relevant, about Alan Watts’ (no relation) paraphrase from Zen, “When sitting, just sit; when walking, just walk; above all, don’t wobble — but if you must wobble, wobble well.” In many ways, a badly finished… but finished… tool chest is actually more beneficial than an almost-perfect but incomplete tool chest. It protects your tools, serves as a reminder of mistakes, but also represents an accumulation of learning and experiences and expertises than are repeatable. There’s a mountain of plane shavings between me and the excellence of the craft — and a hillock of completed pieces that has to be accumulated before I can call myself a successful woodworker.
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.
