The moulding profile on the skirts surrounding the tool chest can be almost any profile – I’ve used everything from a chamfer to an ogee to a square ovolo.
After much fussing, I’ve settled on a 30° bevel that suits both contemporary and traditional tastes.
On my first few chests I used 7/8”-thick skirting material and cut a 45° chamfer on the corner and left a significant flat at the top edge – about 5/16”. That looks fine, and it’s the profile I have on my current chest.
After studying another 50 or so chests, I became fond of a second sort of profile: a 30° bevel with a 1/4” flat on top. In 7/8”-thick material, this bevel is about 1” tall. This 30° bevel makes the chest look a lot less blocky and it doesn’t take any additional time to create.
After more than 20 years of building tool chests, I try to avoid complex mouldings on the skirts. They are easily damaged and they date your chest (which is not necessarily a bad thing but is not my thing).
We get this question every week. Here’s the short version of the story:
We were using American Apparel shirts for the printing, and the company’s supply chain is frustrating. It would regularly (every week) run out of some color or some size and stop supplying it to our printer.
Also, our warehouse was having trouble integrating our T-shirts into some of its new inventory software. So we removed shirts from the site until we could get a new supplier and our warehouse could get its ducks in a row.
Right now we are evaluating three new suppliers – one domestic and two that are international. We always prefer to use domestic suppliers. But my position is that if you can’t supply the product, then you suck and we won’t use you. So we might end up with an international supplier on this product.
So shirts should be back up on the site within a couple weeks. If we use the supplier I am favoring, we’ll be able to offer sizes XS up to 5XL.
Making the bottom boards of a tool chest is straightforward work. For years I made tongue-and-groove boards using rough pine and beaded the tongue side.
Then, I visited Menards.
This home center giant carries 1 x 8 x 8’ pine carsiding in Eastern white pine. It is already tongue-and-grooved and finished beautifully. I couldn’t find any machine marks when I handplaned it. And the price in incredible. In the store a 1 x 8 x 8’ is about $5.50. That’s cheaper than I can buy rough white pine.
So all you have to do is crosscut it, plane it and nail it in place.
This takes us to another change I’ve adopted since publication of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011. I use Rivierre nails to fasten the bottom boards instead of cut nails. These nails hold as well as blacksmith-made Roman-style nails.
The most stressful part of building a tool chest is gluing the lower skirt to the carcase. The fit has to be perfect. If it’s not, the skirt won’t go on at all (this happened to a student once). Or it will be a little loose and you’ll have an ugly gap between the skirt and the carcase.
The first hurdle is to get the four skirt pieces to the perfect length. Here’s how I do this: Dovetail one corner of the skirt, assemble it dry and clamp it in place to the tool chest. Make sure the skirt is dead flush with the bottom edge of the carcase.
Then use a block plane blade to scribe the baselines on the skirt pieces.
Then use a scrap that is the same thickness as your skirt material to pencil in the final lengths of the skirting pieces. Crosscut them and shoot them to final length.
Repeat the process with the other two skirting pieces. Cut the profile on the top edge of the skirting boards (I used a 30° bevel) and plane off the machine marks on the outside of the skirt boards.
The skirts extend 3/4” below the bottom edge of the carcase, creating a rabbet for the bottom boards.
To create this rabbet, nail four scrap pieces of your bottom material to the bottom edge of the carcase. When you glue the skirting to the carcase, those parts will need to be flush with the bottom of these scrap blocks.
Gluing on the skirt is like docking a ship. Glue the two long skirt boards to one short skirt board. Paint the inside of this U-shaped assembly with glue and slide it onto the carcase. Flush the skirts with the scrap blocks as best you can.
Then glue on the fourth skirting board. Place the assembly on a benchtop and knock the skirt boards down until they are flush against the benchtop. Clamp up the dovetails to squeeze out any gaps in the joints. Walk away.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If, after all this work, you end up with a gap between the skirt and carcase, decline to freak. I’ll show you a trick to hide it beautifully that doesn’t involve paint or putty.
