I forgot to post this the other day, but I was able to finish the lid, and attach it. There’s some wonkiness to how it all fits together — the barrels for the hinges are set up so the barrel of one hinge is INSIDE the chest, and the barrel of the other hinge is OUTSIDE. Which is dumb, and not the way it should be set up. Also, these are not the hinges I had planned for this chest.
But, sometimes things don’t work out as planned. And a few things went wrong with the installation process of the back, and this led to some impossible layout lines for attaching the lid the way that Megan Fitzpatrick suggested.
Alas.
On the other hand, the chest is done and stands in the right place in my office/studio. And it’s got Rex Kreuger’s tool-tote in front of it, and a stack of wood for future projects just waiting. It will hold my whole tool collection for woodworking and various home repairs, too — and I feel like I’ve gotten a much better handle on how to make future projects. My wife already has three in mind for me, which feels right. I’m excited for the future in this craft 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.
