A few years back (OK – more than a decade ago), we shared designer Wesley Tanner’s instructions for opening a new book with a sewn binding:
“The first thing I do when I get a book like this with sewn signatures is to ‘open it up.’ I remove the jacket off and lay the book on a table (admiring the lovely silver stamping). Looking at the top or bottom edge at the spine, I find the middle of the first section, and open the book with both hands gripping the outside edges of the pages, and gently ‘break’ the glue that has seeped through the sewing holes. I only open the book far enough to do this, about 80 percent of the way down to flat, as I don’t want to wreck the spine. After I’ve done two or three signatures I start from the back, as this will counter the natural twist the book’s spine will get after reading the book straight through. After that, the book should lay open on the table when I go get another cup of coffee.”
The method in the graphic at top isn’t so different. It, too, requires a table and just a bit of care.
Neither method calls for more than a few minutes’ work – and it will allow you (and your heirs) to enjoy a well-made book (like those from Lost Art Press!) for decades – even centuries – to come.
Peter Galbert just released a new 8-hour video on making his Temple Chair (from either green or kiln-dried wood). Along with his expert instruction – and Peter is one of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered – you’ll get a handbook, as well as full-sized pdf plans drawn by Jeff Lefkowitz.
As I write this, in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, hundreds of attendees and a dozen or so presenters are enjoying the waning hours of the 27th annual “Working Wood in the 18th Century” conference. This year’s theme was “To Furnish a Town: High, Low, and In-Between,” and I was honored to be asked to reproduce for it a piece in the museum collection, a late 18th-/early 19th-century dovetailed blanket chest.
And I was very much looking forward to the other presentations, including CW joiners Bill Pavlak and John Peeler talking about the evolution of style and construction on drop-front desks and dining tables. Curator Tara Chicirda on how 18th-century homes were furnished (and how we outfit those same spaces today). Conservator Chris Swan on how furniture surface decoration and finish has changed over time. And lots more. I love this stuff! (Heck – I even bought a new car in large part so I didn’t have to worry about mechanical issues while driving from Cincinnati to Williamsburg – that’s how eager I was to go!)
Check out the wave on those sweetgum end boards!
I’m not sure if the CW folk consider this chest by an unknown maker as representative as “low” or “in-between,” and I didn’t think to ask. (But because I’ve never met a shell carving I wanted to carve or a marquetry panel I was slavering to make, it’s safe to assume they asked me as a representative of the vernacular, so not high.) Once I got a closer look at the chest, I categorized it as a “high low,” or “low in-between.” The joinery and simple design was well executed, and the dovetails were evenly spaced and well cut…but no city joiner would have chosen sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) as one of the primary woods for this piece. You know how we often say, “Wood hates you?” Well sweetgum loathes the very thought of your existence.
The maker used Southern yellow pine for the front, back, top and plinth; the sides and bottom are sweetgum. Notice the dovetails pulling apart at the sides. That’s the sweetgum working its warped magic. These dovetails are all wedged (the wedges are in the middle of each pin). In most species, that would lock the joints together for generations. I suspect these started pulling apart not terribly long after construction…because I got the same wavy and exciting drying in my sweetgum boards within a day of surfacing it – after it had been carefully dried, allowed to acclimate, flattened in stages to allow for moisture exchange and to accommodate movement, and generally treated like I would care for a sickly kitten: carefully and lovingly. Then the kitten poops on you.
I had to work around the splits – there was but one slab. What you see is all you get!
I was lucky to find a wide slab of sweetgum at C.R. Muterspaw (it’s not typically a commercially available wood), and Shea Alexander of Alexander Brothers tracked down, cut and dried some gorgeous SYP for me. I needed stuff wide enough for single boards for the front, back and ends – those big boards were a lot easier to find 225 years ago, I’m guessing (or not…the original maker scabbed on narrow pieces to the top and bottom to make up the overall width – but maybe that was just poor planning).
This was a big pine tree; the planer is a 20″. And the shop smelled like a Southern forest for days afterward (yum!).
The biggest problem I expected from the pine was sap, and of course I got it. I had to wipe my saw down with mineral spirits after every couple of cuts. But I also had a little trouble with the SYP splitting – so I incorporated that into my planned stage show. I cut and fit all the joinery in our shop, kerfed the pins for the wedges on all but the fourth corner, and cut the plinth pieces and moulding blanks for the underside of the lid (the original had some kind of moulding nailed on around the sides and front, though it’s now missing). I’d finish up the kerfs on stage, then assemble the chest…and enjoy the audience gasps as the SYP split while I tapped in the wedges. I figured if I anticipated the split, it might not happen – a reverse psychology play, if you will, on “man plans, the gods laugh.”
I was so close to ready!
But gosh did the gods laugh…
Two weeks ago, as I was finishing up the prep on my chest pieces and making lists of the tools to pack for the trip (in my Dutch tool chest, of course!), I slipped on an icy Covington city street and snapped my ankle in three places. So instead of driving my new car to Williamsburg, I’m sitting on my couch (crutches within grabbing distance), with my ankle elevated above my heart and recovering from surgery. (Good thing I’ve plenty of editing to keep me busy in the coming weeks!)
Thanks, Zach, for letting me steal your IG snap (but did you have to take one where all my wrinkles are showing?!).
I wasn’t able to do the presentation I’d planned (obviously), but I did manage to cobble together a slide show with voiceover – thank goodness I took lots of pictures of both the original chest and my own build process – and the folk at CW made it work (thank you to everyone there!). Then I Zoomed in for the Saturday morning session, and took questions afterward. (It’s weird to watch yourself on screen.)
I plan to get back to the chest build in a few months – I hate leaving things unfinished. I just have to hope the sweetgum pieces haven’t in the meantime warped into hyperbolic paraboloids. But I rather expect them to.
In the meantime, I’ll be here on the couch, writing and editing. The only ones happy about all this are Olivia and Toby.
The below was written by our good friend Mattias Hallin, who lives in Belgium (though he would, I think, want me to let you know he is Swedish). You might recall that he is our non-resident expert in linseed oil paint, from this 2024 post (and he wrote for us about overseas ordering, for those few Lost Art Press items not available through our international stockists).
His tool chest – which we’re calling the Archivist’s Tool Chest because that’s his profession – is a study in meticulous planning of storage (and hardware). We asked him to write about it for the blog, and he kindly delivered.
I’ve posted an goodly excerpt below, with a link to download a pdf of Mattias’ entire write-up.
When I was in Covington for a chair class in 2022, Megan kindly lent me a Dutch Tool Chest (DTC) for temporary storage of all the tools I’d brought, and I found that I really liked working out of it. At the same time, I got a good, close-up look at Chris’ and Megan’s full-size Anarchist’s Tool Chests (ATC), and decided there and then to one day build an ATC myself (and a DTC, but that’s a different story) – except, in my case the A stands for Archivist, as that is what I do for a living, while I have nary an anarchic bone in my body.
And now I have built that chest.
This blog post, though, is not about the chest build as such, which, bar some personal tweaks and touches, is pretty much straight out of ‘the literature’ (The Anarchist’s Tool Chest and its addenda here on the blog and in Megan’s videos on the ATC interior and a traveling ATC). Rather, it is about how I approached designing the tool storage, and the ideas and solutions I came up with in that process, as these offer some ideas not suggested in the ATC book.
The Chest: Some Basic Facts
Before diving into my big box, though, just a few words about its general construction.
It is mainly built out of Pinus strobus, i.e. Eastern White or (as it is usually known over here) Weymouth Pine. Runners and till bottoms are oak (Querqus spp, probably robur). The sliding till walls and tool racks are hard maple (Acer saccharum), and finally there’s some boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) for boxing the lid stay slots, while the block plane cubby is pear (Pyrus communis).
Dovetailed carcase and skirts as per TATC. Through-tenoned lid frame, as per same. Bottom boards nailed on, as per, etc. and so forth.
The hardware (except a set of vintage cast iron casters, bought online) is blacksmith made, designed and forged by the fantastic Tom Latané.
The finish is Ottosson linseed oil paints on the outside, and the company’s oil/wax paste on the tills and racks.
The internal space of the empty shell is 36-11/16″ long, 22-1/8″ wide and 23-15/16″ high. Nothing magical about those oddish numbers: they’re simply what aiming for 36-1/2″ x 22-1/4″ x 24″ ended up as.
Mock ‘em Up!
I barely know my way around SketchUp et al., and while I think I can safely say I’m not bad at figuring stuff out just in my head, for many things I also like to check that thinking by mocking them up. This is particularly true for anything three-dimensional.
Planning for tool storage in my chest began with a considered decision on the dimensions of the basic shell. The larger that shell, the more tool storage potential, so bigger may seem better. That, however, is not the whole story. For starters, a larger chest eats up more space in your shop and becomes more unwieldy to move about. Also, if it is too wide and/or too deep, it becomes hard to reach the bottom or the rear corners. And Chris and Megan warn from experience that the longer the chest, the more likely it is the sliding tills will rack.
So, my initial instinct to throw space at the problem and go large was quickly reined in.
The simplest way forward would have been to just go with the measurements from ATC, but in order not to box myself in too soon, I decided to make the rough panels well over size by some 5″ or so in both length and width. This let me show them to one another and get a much better feel both for how large different sizes of chest would be and how well (or not) I would be able to reach into them.
(Here, by the way, is as good a place as any to say that I mostly don’t work to a cutlist and try to use as few measurements as possible. I do almost all stock prep and dimensioning with hand tools, so usually work to the largest thickness commonly available between a set of parts and make them to fit each other rather than be exactly some pre-defined size.)
Showing the oversized panels to each other already at the rough stage gave me a feel for what might – and mightn’t! – be suitable dimensions and proportions.
Other than overall size and internal reachability, I also knew already at this stage that I wanted:
For the sliding tills to measure at least just over 8″ in internal width (because my woobie box is 8″ long);
to have full access to two sliding tills at a time with no overlap; and
to hang my backsaws between the front wall and the front tool rack.
I did not yet know the exact outer dimensions of the sliding tills, or the thickness of the surface-mounted hinge leaves, nor would I for quite a while, but to get 8-and-a-bit ” internal would likely mean 9″–9-1/2″ external width per till, so 18″–19″ for two tills to open with no overlap.
Add to that at least 2″ for the front rack with room behind for saws, plus a margin for the hinges, and I suspected that the 20-1/8″ internal width in the drawings in ATC would risk being a tad on the tight side.
For final dimensions I therefore decided that all four panels should be 24″ high (same as in the ATC), the front and back 38-1/2″ long (so 1/2″ more than in the book) and the ends 24″ wide (so 2-1/8″ more). Everything else would follow from there.
Thinking Inside the Box: Basic Premises
Lesson learned: when you plan to bevel a dovetail, don’t undercut the middle (cf. lower skirt right-hand corner). Filler and paint are your friends, if you do.
While things followed, and the basic carcase came together, I had plenty of time to think ahead and consider the basic premises for how I would want to organize the tool storage. On the one hand, I have a strong tendency towards a place for everything, everything in its place and the skates go in the fridge. On the other hand, I had no wish to French-fit the interior. To use an extreme comparison: I am in great awe and admiration of the Studley tool cabinet, but I wouldn’t have it if you paid me to.
In daily practice I will most likely put a tool back in more or less the same spot where I picked it up, but over time where that spot is may well move around.
Basic Premise #1: Tool storage should be flexible.
That said, my tool set is by now quite stable. I have acquired most of the tools I need or see a future need of. I have also sold or given away a number of tools that I either upgraded or didn’t expect ever to use (again). By now, I think what I have left are the keepers.
I will not be able to fit every single keeper into this chest, but then I never expected to. There are, however, keeper tools that I am as certain as makes no difference will live in this chest for the rest of my days. Some of those tools may as well have a permanent place specially fitted to them.
Basic Premise #2: There can be duly motivated exceptions to Premise #1.
Notwithstanding tool set stability, I am no exception to the general rule when it comes to mental shopping lists. That is to say, I have one. Mine may be much shorter than before (cf. stable tool set), but there are tools I know I shall want to get in the coming years. If I know that now, and that I shall want to store them in the chest, I might as well plan for that.
Basic Premise #3: Try to think ahead.
Then again, you never know, so racks and tills should be as easy to replace as is commensurate with safe and solid storage while they’re in use.
Basic Premise #4: Don’t over-fix the fixtures – they may have to come out.
Finally, no matter the solution selected for individual tools, they should come out and go back in easily, blocking each others paths as little as possible. The more frequent the use, the easier the access should be. Edges shall be protected, as shall fingers, hands and arms when rummaging through the depths of the chest. Space should not be wasted, though, but a happy medium sought between efficient storage and effective use.
Basic Premise #5: Aspire to conduct a well-balanced tool ballet.
With these premises clear in my mind, I could start to purposefully mockup dummy versions of the fixed racks and tills and put my ideas and these premises to the test.
Front Tool Rack
The first questions to which I sought answers were, what distance should there be between the front wall and the front tool rack to best store my backsaws, and how high should the rack be above the floor?
My longest backsaw is an 18″ tenon saw. It will live in the saw till on the chest floor, but I still wanted to make sure it could also hang behind the front tool rack if needed. On the other hand, that tool rack should not sit any higher than necessary for that to work. In part because some tool handles are rather long, but mostly to make sure there will be room enough above the rack to fit a crab lock to the inside of the front wall.
While it would have been possible to measure the saw handles and plates and calculate the answers, I am wary of that method, as mistakes won’t be caught early. A mockup with some scraps is quickly cobbled together, and this one let me test different distances and heights by adding or removing spacer blocks.
It turned out that 5/8″ was the ideal distance between wall and rack, and that with the top of the rack at 16-1/4″ above the floor my biggest backsaw would fit with 1/8″ to spare. I made a careful note of these figures.
I also wanted to know how wide the tool rack should be, what distance from the outer edge holes would be best for tool holes, and what sizes and shapes of holes would best work for different tools, in particular those that would have a permanent place?
Again, dummy racks made from pine offcuts was the perfect method for me. They were easy to run up from an ample supply of material left over from the panel prep, so I could test as many possibilities as I wanted. The “standard” tool hole suggested in the literature is 1/2″ diameter and is drilled with the center point 1/2″ in from the edge. The latter I found held good, but a 1/2″ hole is too small to hold certain tools as well as I wish. Thus, the socket of a Lie-Nielsen chisel seats perfectly in a 14mm (or 9/16″) hole, while a Blue Spruce chisel needs a 5/8″ (or 16mm) hole for the ferrule to go in deep enough that it won’t wobble in the rack. And for my set of Barr Tools cabinetmaker’s chisels, that have larger sockets, the perfect size hole turned out to be 19mm (3/4″).
(While I mostly work in customary/imperial units these days, I drilled some of these tool holes in the closest metric equivalent if that was the best drill bit for the job I had to hand.)
For my pigsticker mortise chisels, I tested elongated holes in different lengths and widths until I found the particular sizes that would best fit each one of them, taking into account the tapered undersides of the bolsters. And for my two paring chisels I went fully bespoke – but I’ll come back to that in the Photo Gallery below.
I also experimented a fair bit to find the ideal distance between centers but won’t go into any detail on that; suffice to say that, depending on the tools involved, it varied between 1-1/2″ and 2-1/4″.
As for the width of the rack, 1-3/8″ turned out to be right, giving a total width of 2″ including the space for saws. While that does not leave much room between the saw handles and the handles of tools stored in the rack, I tested the setup thoroughly and concluded I would be happy with it. I was in any case anxious not to have the front rack extend more than really needed in order to minimize potential interference with the saw till on the floor below.
Saw Till
Speaking of the saw till, it took a fair bit of experimentation to find the right configuration. For starters, how many saws should it hold? I currently have two handsaws – a 26″ rip and a 24″ crosscut – and as already mentioned, I also wanted to store the 18″ tenon saw in this till. That’s three saws. However, on my shopping list are two short – 18″ or 20″ – handsaws, a rip and a crosscut, so I decided on a five-slot till.
With that made clear, there still remained a number of issues to sort out. The till needed to be roomy enough for ease of operation without gobbling up too much floor space. What would that mean in terms of distance between slots? On testing, I found 3/4″ too tight to allow the easy grab of a saw, 1″ fine but unnecessarily roomy, so 15/16″ turned out to be the Goldilocks number.
And would I want to store stuff below the saws? There’s potential space there, but only accessible by removing the saws, which is not very handy. I first thought it would be a good spot for my roll of saw files, which don’t come out all that often, but found that idea overridden by a more important consideration: the placement of the slotted till uprights should be in function of where the backsaw blades will hang.
The front rack has four spacer blocks to create the 5/8″ slot for backsaws, one at either end and two somewhere in the middle, through which the rack is also screwed to the chest wall. The two middle ones I located to optimize the available room to fit my particular set of backsaws, not forgetting to leave room in the middle for the crab lock.
The saw till uprights were then best placed immediately below the two middle spacer blocks to keep them from obstructing the space available for hanging saws. This turned out to mean an off-center placement, with the two uprights too close together for the file tool roll to fit, even on the diagonal. In the end I decided to leave 2-1/2″ underneath the saws: high enough that e.g. a Trusco box will fit in there if needs be, but not conceived to be a major storage space.
There is still about 1-1/2″ clearance between the top of the saw handles and the underside of the bottom sliding till, so in theory I could have gone an inch or so higher. But that would have had an unwanted effect on the interplay between the innermost slot and the tool rack above. For a saw to come out and go in with full clearance from longer tools in the rack, the slot has to be about 2-1/4″ out from the chest wall. Starting a set of five slots from there, though, would have made the whole till go a full 7″ into the central well.
I bought the 18″ tenon saw for my bench build. It did a great job on the massive tenons involved in that but is not in any way a daily user on furniture-size projects. I am not getting rid of it, but it can certainly be stored in a harder-to-reach spot. Thus, I decided to have the innermost slot at but 1-1/4″ from the wall, in effect between the hanging backsaws and the tools in the rack. To get a saw in or out of there, any long tools must first come out of the rack, but for the very occasional use of the 18″ tenon saw, that’s not a problem. The other four slots have good clearance, and the whole saw till, including the bracing rails, ends at 6-1/8″ into the central well, giving me a full 12″ of width for storing bench planes between the till and the molding plane corral.
The finished saw till, with the uprights in line with two middle spacer blocks behind the front rack above. The top cross brace is much shorter than what’s suggested in the literature, for a reason. Having it go all the way out to the side walls would not make the construction meaningfully stronger, but it would interfere with tool storage in the side racks.
To read more, download Mattias Hallin’s pdf below.
Note: The above image is unrelated to the column below – but we needed some illustration! It’s from Vol. 3 of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years.” That volume, along with the three other volumes that are currently out of stock, will be available again soon!
The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). These columns are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature. And yet they all speak to our work at the bench, providing us a place and a reason to exist in modern society.
It always gives one a little sense of shock, I think, to come up against fresh evidence of what a very ancient craft woodwork is, and how very slow to change. During the re-building of the Bank of England, which took place a short time ago, workmen excavating the foundations came down to the peat bed of the old Walbrook, a stream which once ran right through the heart of the City, and in it they found an old Roman barrel in a remarkable state of preservation. This barrel is now on exhibition in the British Museum, in the gallery devoted to Roman remains in Britain, and is a magnificent example of how traditional craftsmanship has a continuity of its own. The metal bands have perished, leaving only a faint discoloration behind showing their position, but the wood itself is in a remarkable state of preservation, thanks to the action of the peat. And it shows in a startling degree how very little cooperage has changed in the last fifteen hundred years. There is the same treatment of the wood, with diagonal scraping over the inner side, the same bevelling of the timber edges. I nearly said the same bung-hole, but in this instance there are two bung-holes, the theory being that one bung may have got too tightly wedged in, and it was easier to make another hole than to force it.
To me there is always a thrill in discoveries such as these. They leap over the barriers of time, language and race—though even our word “cooper” comes from the Latin cuparius—and show us the men themselves, facing the same difficulties and overcoming them in much the same way as we do to this day. Man’s conquest of material was extraordinarily effective even in the ancient civilisations, and at the highest point of development in the civilisations of Greece and Rome was in no whit behind our own. If we want to see, for example, what the Greeks could do with stone, we have only to look at the Elgin marbles in the British Museum and see (broken fragments though they are) how they are penetrated with life and feeling; or to look at the marvellous Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre to see how life and movement at their loveliest were wrought into stone, so that we are no longer conscious of it as a stubborn, inert material. Nowadays, by the development of machinery, we have discovered quicker methods for the handling of material, making large scale production possible, but we have carried creative art no further, because that is something which has its genesis in the spirit of man and not in his tools.
I wonder if we are not rather too content nowadays to leave creation alone. Even to let our woodwork confine itself to a few repair jobs about the house, a few useful labour saving articles, and not to set ourselves to conquer our material in real earnest and become expert craftsmen. We are not even dealing with a dead thing. Wood is a living, sympathetic material, having none of the stubbornness of stone; it is man’s oldest friend, and capable of giving beauty as well as service. A good many of us, I think, have the urge for achievement: what is really lacking is the faith to persevere, a faith which becomes increasingly difficult in a world where so little is done by hand. The older type of craftsman saw men all around him working in the same way: he knew what could be done and took it all for granted. But nowadays nothing is easier for the man who works with hand tools to develop a kind of inferiority complex and doubt his own powers, especially if he is doing the thing as a hobby and is out of touch with fellow workers. We need to remind ourselves not only of what is possible but of what other men have done; that a real flame of enthusiasm, combined with determination to become skilled, will liberate powers of doing and creating of which we can only be dimly conscious while we are content to potter.
For there is a dynamic quality about enthusiasm which nothing can resist. You can see it in the street orator, whose whole heart is in his argument, swaying a crowd. You can feel it in the work of any artist—painter, writer, musician, or whatever he be—if he has put himself into the thing he has wrought in, felt it enough, suffered it enough. And the beginning of the year is a good time, it seems to me, to set about enkindling our enthusiasm afresh. For life is a dead thing without it. Make it woodwork, if our tastes lie in that direction; make it stamp collecting; make it anything in the wide world so long as it is alive and vital.
Living as we have all been living, first in a war-weary world and then in a world distracted by slumps and war rumours, it has not been altogether easy to keep any enthusiasm alive. All the more reason then for renewal when the year begins afresh. And we can remind ourselves that some of the best work of the world has been executed in turbulent times. We can see it in the pages of old Vasari, the painter of the Italian Renaissance who has come down to fame, not by reason of his own pictures, but from the fascinating record he has left us of the Florentine craftsmen—mostly painters and sculptors—of the period. It has long been a habit of mine, whenever I want real refreshment of the spirit or feel that I want to recapture the spirit of enthusiasm, to turn back into the pages of old Vasari and read just how those men worked, with a fire, a zeal, a soaring ambition which has never since been equalled. It is a mine of good stories and sage maxims, and the men with all their oddities and idiosyncracies are made to live again. In Florence enthusiasm was communicated from one man to another to a marvellous degree. It is quaintly summed up in the words of an old painter to the young Perugino, who asked him why it was that in Florence men became so perfect in all the arts. It was because, he said, in Florence there was such a spirit of criticism abroad that men judged work upon its own good qualities rather than from the name of its authors. Then prices were so high that they spurred a man on to make money; and thirdly, the very air generated a thirst for honour and glory, since no man of ability would suffer himself to be outdistanced by other men “fashioned like himself, even though acknowledged to be masters.” Which gets to the root of the matter pretty thoroughly!
