In “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” I profess a love – actually it’s more of an uncomfortable lust, the kind so weird that you can’t look the other person in the eye the next morning – for Eastern white pine.
But Eastern white pine can be difficult to find outside of its range on the Eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes area.
I’ve had several readers ask me for alternative choices for woods for the shell of a tool chest. I do have a few ideas to share, but before I do that, here’s the “how to fish” portion of the blog entry: Look for a cheap, lightweight wood that is indigenous to your area. Buy it in 4/4 or 5/4 in the rough and dress it to 7/8” or 1” thickness and you will be fine.
Don’t buy 3/4” surfaced material — that’s too thin.
So if you are in the deep South, look for cypress. Out West? Sitka spruce. Europe? Scots pine. In the Middle West, look hard for Eastern white pine, it’s out there.
If none of these options pan out for you, use poplar, which is widely available in most parts of the United States.
If you have other suggestions, post them in the comments below.
— Christopher Schwarz
Western white pine and sugar pine would also be options on the West Coast, with working properties similar to eastern white pine.
Chris – Why not use a wood like cherry, walnut, etc.? Thanks…Tom
Sitka spruce? Please — save that for the poor guys trying to scrounge up enough to build spars for their dream boat. Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine are available in wide(r) boards, and would be light enough for this application. Both have a tendency to tear out, but this is a tool chest, not a highboy. Alder is also fairly light, works easily, available, and inexpensive.
Reclaimed redwood would be nice – it’s abundant in NorCal.
I’ve been wondering about hemlock. Its widely available here on the PacNW coast, and in my experience with it as carpentry trim material and for shelves, its pleasant to work with and seems strong. Would love to hear what others think of this.
I’ve been wondering about sycamore. There are a lot of big trees here in SW Missouri. I’ve never worked with it though.
Sycamore is a good bit heavier than most softwoods and devilish to dry properly. It has interlocking grain that causes all but perfectly flatsawn boards to warp and twist like airplane propellers. The quartersawn wood has very attractive ray fleck that makes it desirable for things like floating panels and small boxes, but in general, I would steer clear of sycamore for something big like a toolchest.
Point taken. Thanks.
I did in fact contact Jim Tolpin to ask his opinion on Northwest versions of “deal” and Southern Yellow Pine (which I assume to be Doug Fir) but haven’t heard back… I’ll share here if he replies.
At the risk of putting words in Chris’s mouth — the tool chest is not a piece of furniture; in a sense, it is a tool itself. It will be used, which means it’s going to get dinged up — hence the paint finish. It will be loaded with tools that, together, will be plenty heavy, and it’s a BIG BOX — hence the requirement for a lightweight wood. It’s also likely that this will not be the last tool box I ever build; I expect to build one, and then have to build another as I figure out what I really want in it and where everything should go. Don’t overthink this, methinks. Just build the bloody thing.
I’m from the Northwest and was also considering using Alder. I’m still researching other native NW woods, that might work well for a tool chest.
Mike
To quote…”get local, get smaller, get finer, downscale, solidify your friendships”. The point being, learn what your area has to offer in the way of resources.
‘Divided by a common language’
I’m English, and not familiar with your habit of describing dimensions like this: ‘4/4 or 5/4 in the rough and dress it to 7/8” or 1”
Where does this come from, and why?
4/4 and 5/4 refer to rough-sawn boards that are about 1 1/8″ and 1 3/8″ thick, respectively. You would read it as “four-quarter” and “five-quarter”, as in four quarters of an inch (that is, 1″) or five quarters of an inch (i.e, 1.25″). The extra 1/8″ is added to account for the variability in rough-sawn lumber, and in reality the actual thickness of a rough-sawn 4/4 board could vary from 1 1/16″ to 1 3/16″.
How about soft maple? It’s pretty cheap around here (MN).
Here in the Rockies, Ponderosa Pine is readily had and may be a workable substitute for Eastern White Pine. Also, as the Pine Bark Beetle moves through Western Forests, also look for beetle-killed timber of various pine species (although I’d avoid Lodgepole Pine); there is a crying need to develop uses and markets for these timbers to get it out of the forest as part of fire mitigation.
As someone noted above, the toolchest is itself a tool, and not a piece of furniture.
For those europeans who (like me) didn’t know what Scots pine is: it is just pinus sylvestris, in dutch “grenen”. Commonly available in different qualities.
Oh and thanks Christopher, I lerned a lot of your books: Workbenches and Handplane essentials.
At least I know now that I bought the wrong plane Stanley Bailey 4c, and fortunately after reading your book I could tune it to an acceptible state.
Theo Prangsma
If you’re going traditional US styles, the most common wood was poplar followed by pine and then some fancy hardwood if the maker had access to it or wanted to really show off. Working chests were painted, as has been pointed out, and most often poplar. It’s light, tough, easily worked and dings without splintering. Skirts and bases were often made of tougher wood such as oak. Pine can be quite full of pitch as well as subject to a lot of movement, oak can mar metallic tools and walnut, well, walnut everybody loves. It’s just so heavy.
I have two old tool chests, one of walnut and rosewood, one of poplar and apple. The first is impossible to move without four sets of hands. The second must be half the weight although I’ve never measured it. The walnut chest came from the north shore of Massachusetts and appeared to be used by a shipwright which I think accounts for the fancy woods (‘borrowed’ from a ship under construction).
I ended up using Poplar even after you told me Cypress. The reason was mainly cost, but also I didn’t like how the Cypress felt. It was really wet feeling and I didn’t want the pitch to clog up my planes. The Poplar is $1.90 per BF rough. Can’t really beat that. I went with 5/4 and glad I did. I live in Houston and the humidity played havoc. Of course rooky me didn’t let it acclimate. Lesson learned.
Comment from Sydney Australia—
I asked Trend Timbers (a well known local merchant) today what would be the equivalent of your beloved YellowPine. For Australians it is apparently Kauri Pine. Available from these guys at least in 25mm or 32mm thickness, 300mm wide boards, knot free at tight grain without the resinous puke found in Radiata Pine. At $6.50 a board foot it is apparently on the low end of the price scale of locally available timbers.
Another consideration is that we are not the same people as those in past. Our needs may be different now. Probably are. How many of us would actually move a chest like this from jobsite to jobsite today? Not many. Most will just put it close to the workbench. For those with small shops, working out of a chest might be the best solution. As to the wood, why not make it as pretty as possible, inlays, veneers, etc.? Seems to me the chest is also about the size of a blanket chest. Seems like an excellent way to improve one’s skills. As for weight, I wouldn’t move a full dresser, it’s too heavy. I would remove the drawers and make it lighter. Same thing could be done with a tool chest. Besides, a full heavy chest would be harder to steal.
Eric
For those working wood in the mountain time zone, Aspen would be an excellent substitute for EWP because it is lightweight and quite soft – in other words it works like a dream. The only downside is that it isn’t available in the gargantuan widths that EWP is.
Another very workable substitute for EWP in the East is Basswood. If one looks to small family-owned sawmills, it’s pretty easy to find in large widths from the Appalacian region and the upper Midwest. It works easier than EWP, and it has little to no pitch. It is also quite strong.
i just bought reclaimed long leaf pine and chestnut-both were once traditional tool chest woods, especially in the south….it is not cheap($10 or so bd ft), but spectacular with a simple oil finish….plus all the worm holes, dings and assorted imperfections make an instant antique……..
One shouldn’t make it so nice that you are afraid to use it. I plan on using the snot out of mine. It won’t often leave my shop (unless I move or upgrade shops), so I think it should work, and because it is made the way it is, it is cool.
Chestnut is beautiful stuff and hard to get. Every now and then I find a piece of old furniture advertised as Oak when in fact it’s Chestnut. Ok, so I don’t tell the seller what it really is when I buy it.
Long leaf SYP heartwood is nice.
A question about the height of the saw till. It would seem that if the till wasn’t so high there would be room for another drawer. What would be the drawbacks?
Cliff
The thing about four trays — as opposed to three — is that it is more difficult to array four trays for use.
With three trays you can stagger them so you can grab every tool in every one of them — and be one hand motion away from all the tools in the bottom.
I’m in the Midwest US. We go out and find a shrubbery.
Actually, Southern Yellow Pine, Ponderosa Pine, Douglass Fir, Aspen and Poplar are available in sufficient quantities.
I would caution anyone in the Northwest who is looking at Doug Fir to keep looking. SYP it is most definately NOT. Most crappy DF can be had for less than a buck a board ft at big box and lumbyard alike. Though dense I’m pretty sure the Janka rating is taken from it’s CVG variant ($8 board foot BTW!) and most of the homecenter/lumberyard DF is obscenely soft. It’s often young growth or nearer to the heartwood. The earlywood is like spongecake and the late wood is like concrete which makes parallel to grain operations a nightmare. I get so much earlywood shrink that my bench looks like it has cooling fins. Paring cuts to clean up endgrain suck because the latewood won’t cut and it just crushes the spongecake layers of earlywood. The concretewood also likes to be torn free from the spongecakewood when planing as well.
Though cheap and plentiful I would import something from the south/east for bench making if/when I make another bench. Poplar is too soft and very twisted. Would love to try sitka spruce but the days of massive old growth sitka spruce are gone and I haven’t seen anything good.
Best bet would be reclaimed barn timbers…