When I post photos of my tool chest, there’s a 50 percent chance someone will ask me how much it weighs. My usual and honest answer: I don’t know. It weighs a lot. Two people can easily move it, however.
Today we broke out the heavy-duty scale and weighed my tool chest, which is full of tools. And we weighed two empty tool chests that are on the way out the door to customers. Here are the results.
A full-size Anarchist tool chest in pine (with oak runners) and loaded with my tools weighs 208.6 lbs.
A full-size Anarchist tool chest in pine with pine tills and oak runners and empty weighs 101 lbs.
A full-size Anarchist tool chest in pine with walnut interior and oak runners, empty, weighs 106 lbs.
I hope this satisfies the curious.
— Christopher Schwarz
Thanks. I was the one who put the upward pressure that 50% figure in your recent series on the PopWood blog. A hundred pounds empty was a little surprising to me.
It’s 7/8″ pine. You could reduce the weight by about 10 lbs. (guessing) by switching to 3/4″ pine.
Quite a timely topic, I’m about to move my ATC out of the cellar shop and on to Northern California. It’s a bit heavier since I used poplar. Needless to say we’re taking all the tools and trays out before moving it up the stairs! Thanks for the post.
Chris, sometime would you comment how many hours it takes you to build a chest? Thx., Tom
A basic chest such as this is 40 hours of work. Building two chests is about 60.
I built mine of 1″ poplar and was shocked at how much it weighed empty.
A saying from my youth covers the weight question nicely: More than a lazy hound, less than a fat dead aunt.
I hope I’m getting it right–feel free to correct. For years I thought ‘fat dead ant’, to which I reasoned, that can’t be very much weight. O youth. I also wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up because they get to go through all the cool crap people throw out and they only work one day a week.