Lost Art Press

Author: meghanlostartpress

Impressed with the Simplicity

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
This chair is made of oak and elm. I call it a Carmarthenshire chair, as it is derived from an old chair from that county. The doubling on the arm-back terminates in a ‘swan neck’. This is seen on several old Welsh chairs.

The following is an excerpt from “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown.

“Life without Industry is guilt, and Industry without Art is brutality”

I came back to live in Wales in 1975. I had been made redundant and I was depressed. After years in a job I loved I had been told to go; my skills were no longer appropriate. I had been building wooden boat hulls for years, but now they needed men who could laminate plastics. Had I been prepared to don a plastic boiler suit, wear a respirator and work with nasty, sticky, smelly chemicals, I could have stayed. But I am an uncompromising woodman, I love it. My employers thought the adze as dead as a dodo, so they gave me a small handful of money and told me to pack my box. As I lived in a seaside resort there was not much work that I could do. I wasn’t cut out for selling ice-creams, no killer instinct! My mortgage would be unpayable without a good job. There were plenty waiting to buy my house, so I sold.

I was seven-years-old when we moved from the safety of a large family in the valleys of Wales. Auntie was school-teaching in Kent, Dad came out of the pit and became a bricklayer. So, after a lifetime away, I returned to the ‘Land of my Fathers’. What sort of a living could I make in Wales? There was plenty of building work, but I have a horror of the ‘wet-trades’. I can only work in wood. One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!

At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.

I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and
a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”

A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh
chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makersas such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.

Two particularly good examples of Welsh stick chairs. The comb on the right hand chair is interesting, for although it has no transverse curvature, the maker has tried to individualise this lusty chair with a shaped profile.

I now had the idea that maybe I could make a living out of building chairs. I loved making the first ones; it was new and exciting. But if I was going to be successful I had to try to get into the shoes of the old Welshmen who made these lovely chairs, and try to work as much like them as I could. It isn’t possible to get very near it, life today is so different. I was convinced then, and even more so now, that the chairs were made as occasional items, and that none of them were made by chair-makers. Even with my small overheads, we do live in a total money economy – everything must pay. The lack of electricity has been a plus factor in my work. I have a strong back and don’t care for bills.

I am impressed with the simplicity of old Welsh chairs. I have long been of the opinion that the work of ‘fine’ joiners, work with highly complicated joints, all hidden in the finished piece, leads to clean lines and continuous surfaces which make the finished work uninteresting. I am often tempted to ask these clever fellows “and what’s your next trick?” The Arts and Crafts movement was responsible for a refreshing change. Ernest Gimson went to work with an English country chair-maker, Philip Clisset, to learn how to make simple chairs. Sidney Barnsley, working entirely alone, produced beautiful furniture with exposed dovetails; all the working showing. Of course, all this was over the head of the old Welsh craftsman. A great attraction of Welsh cottage furniture is its simplicity. So with the chair-makers, their work is the equivalent of naive painting. You hear people say “a child could paint that.” Try it!

So I had first to unlearn, and then learn. I was lucky in the order that things happened to me. First, I built some chairs – then I got the books and found out how it should be done. By then I was conceited enough to think that I was closer to the men that built the chairs, 200 years ago, than the sophisticated authors. I have no intention of telling anyone how to build a stick chair, but I will tell you how I do it.

Before I go on to tell you about my methods of work, it would be well if I tell you a little more history of the Windsor chair. First a definition: What is a Windsor chair? Fundamental to a Windsor chair is a solid wooden seat; everything grows from this. From this seat the legs project down, and the sticks or laths project up. That’s it. Arms, combs, fan-backs, balloon-backs, stretchers on the legs, different sorts of turning, a thousand variations – once a chair has a solid wooden seat with legs and sticks socketed into it, then it’s a Windsor. The English Windsor started like the Welsh chair as a peasants’ chair in the countryside. At the beginning of the 19th century, tycoons of the Industrial Revolution decided that what was good enough for Adam Smith’s pins was good enough for the Windsor chair. They set up sweatshops in the Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire. The surrounding beechwoods of the Chiltern Hills provided the material for legs, sticks and bent parts, whilst elm for seats was plentiful everywhere. Bodgers with their pole lathes worked piece-work in the woods, turning legs and stretchers, which they sold to the factories on Saturday evenings. In the workshops, bottomers, benchmen and framers did the rest. Wages were poor and conditions appalling, and even in the last century strikes were not unknown. The owners of the factories were not chair-makers but money-makers. Design had a low priority, but the chairs had one major advantage – they were cheap!

Chairs were made at Wycombe – year in, year out – by the thousands. Piled high on horse-drawn wagons they were shipped to London. A month or so before making the journey most of the parts had been growing in the local woods.

Dealers bought these chairs and they were sold on to the less well off. They were bought for public houses, church halls and other places of entertainment. They found their way into the houses of the rich – but only for the people below stairs. Her Ladyship wouldn’t be seen dead sitting in one. British class distinction at work, the chairs were cheap, so they were expendable. Like the herring, when kippered and rare, it was for the rich. When every fishing port had its smokehouse and they were cheap, then the poor could have them. When baked beans first came to England they could only be had at Fortnum and Masons!

There was no development on these cheap chairs. Identical designs on some types lasted for 150 years. These cheap chairs were exported all over the Empire (sometimes in knockdown form), and became known as the English Windsor. It beggars belief that there are today people making replicas of these chairs for sale in stripped pine shops. Fine cabinet-makers confined themselves to making joined chairs in the Sheraton and Chippendale styles. Some small Windsor chair-makers designed Windsor chairs with elaborate backs, highly carved splats, but used cabriole legs. These in many cases were very fine work, but a chair with cabriole legs is not, strictly speaking, a Windsor.

Good News for our Digital Products

Posted on by meghanlostartpress

If you are a fan of our digital products (pdfs, videos, plans, etc) then you know that they are sent to you as a link via email after checkout. But did you know that you can also access any of your digital purchases by logging into your Lost Art Press account? This prevents you from having to dig through emails or lists of links when you want to find a project that you finally have time for.

I will walk you through that in a minute, but I do have one more piece of good news for customers who have been tracking their purchases with their accounts for years. I frequently receive emails requesting that email addresses be changed or accounts be merged. I have been unable to do this in the past. Not any more! So, if you are one of those customers that somehow ended up with multiple accounts, feel free to reach out to the help desk and I, the Meghan that is not Fitzpatrick, will get you sorted out. You will no longer have to wonder if you ordered “By Hand & Eye” in 2018.

OK: back to how you access your digital content in your account. Start by clicking on the little person in the top right corner of our website and log in…or create an account if you haven’t been using one for your purchases.

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Once you are logged in you will click on the “My Downloadable Files” tab.

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You will then see all of the digital content that you have purchased. Here is what the pdfs will look like:

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And what your videos will look like::

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From here you can stream your video or download it. To download it you will click on the “vimeo” icon in the bottom right corner. This will open the video in a new window with the download option showing.

As always, you can email help@lostartpress.com if you have questions.

Campaign Furniture – Rugged & Simple

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
“Sgt. J. Craig,” an oil on canvas by an unknown artist, circa 1870.
(Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London)

The following is the preface of “Campaign Furniture,” by Christopher Schwarz.

For almost 200 years, simple and sturdy pieces of campaign furniture were used by people all over the globe, yet this remarkable furniture style is now almost unknown to most woodworkers and furniture designers.

“Campaign Furniture” seeks to restore this style to its proper place by introducing woodworkers to the simple lines, robust joinery and ingenious hardware that characterize campaign pieces. With more than 400 photos and drawings to explain the foundations of the style, the book provides plans for nine pieces of classic campaign furniture, from the classic stackable chests of drawers to folding Roorkee chairs and collapsible bookcases.

Like a dormant case of malaria, my fevered love for campaign furniture began many years ago without my knowledge – probably during some hot Connecticut summer.

My maternal grandparents’ home (and ours) was full of campaign furniture. When you drank tea with grandmother West, it was on a folding coaching table my grandfather had built. My grandfather, an enthusiastic woodworker, had brought back campaign brasses from his trips to Asia, some of which I still own. So his pieces definitely had an Anglo-Indian campaign feel to them. And when you visited the West’s house for the summer, you put your clothes in a campaign chest.

My father and mother were fond of the furniture as well. And when my dad built pieces for our home they were at times festooned with brass corner guards, brackets and flush-mount pulls.

As a child, I didn’t think much of the provenance of all this furniture. In fact, I assumed it was Chinese or Japanese furniture because my grandparent’s house was also awash in tansu, Chinese chests and ink paintings of landscapes and animals.

Eventually I wised up and sorted out the furniture record of all our households. The campaign style became a favorite of mine, and I wanted to build pieces of it for the magazine I worked for at the time, Popular Woodworking.

My fellow editors, however, were inoculated against the bug. There was almost nothing written about the style of furniture. And whenever we surveyed our readership, subscribers told us that there were three furniture styles they preferred: country (anything with a duck or pineapple on it), Shaker and Arts & Crafts. “Campaign furniture” was somewhere down the list near “narwhal nose guards” in popularity.

I persisted. I was rejected again. And after I stepped down as editor in 2011, I asked them one last time to publish two articles – one on campaign chests and a second on Roorkee chairs. After some wrangling and veiled threats, they said OK.

Early secretary – note the skeletonized pulls, the moulded top edge and the lack of brass strapping. This chest, circa 1800, was built by Ramsey & Co. Dimensions: 39-3/4″ H x 39-1/2″ W x 20-1/2″ D.
(Courtesy of Christopher Clarke Antiques)

That was the start of my obsession with researching and building campaign furniture. Since 2010, I have been neck-deep in researching the style of furniture that I cannot remember living without. During the last 200 years, there has been surprisingly little written about campaign furniture, which also goes by the name of “barracks furniture,” “camp furniture” or sometimes “patent furniture.” There’s an excellent book by Nicholas A. Brawer that is the single reference work for collectors and dealers, but it is out of print. Plus there are some magazine articles.

Most of the knowledge out there on campaign furniture is in the hands of auctioneers, antique dealers and restorers. So my research began with their sales records, and that led me to the catalogs of the British furniture makers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Plus I dug up several helpful 19th-century books that sought to prepare a British citizen for a long trip abroad.

The real surprise from my initial research was that these pieces of beautiful “military” furniture weren’t just for the military. With the incredible expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century, there was an urgent need for a bureaucracy to manage the Empire’s colonies. (Brawer writes in his book that by 1897 the British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world’s land surface.)

So these campaign chests, folding tables, collapsible chairs and writing desks were in use by bureaucrats, writers, doctors, merchants – plus their families – all over the globe.

Even more interesting: The knockdown aspect of the furniture made it popular with city dwellers who were crammed into tiny city flats – it allowed them to convert a parlor to a dining room to a bedroom. And if you left England on a ship to colonize an island, such as New Zealand, this type of furniture filled your stateroom during the journey and your home when you arrived.

Oh, and if you were a student who left home to go to school, you might tote along some of these items, such as a folding bookcase and a writing slope.

In fact, the romantic idea that all of these pieces of campaign furniture were portaged on the backs of elephants through the jungle is mostly off the mark. In truth, most of these pieces of furniture were the workaday backbone of furniture for people who needed stuff that that was rugged, simple and a bit stylish.

And that idea – rugged, simple and stylish furniture – is what kept me coming back to the belief that campaign furniture is a sorely underappreciated furniture form.

As a woodworker, I love the first-class joinery: dovetails plus mortise-andtenon joints. The simple and rectilinear lines are easy for beginners to make and are as familiar as Shaker or Arts & Crafts items. If you’re not a woodworker, I hope you can appreciate the simple forms and clean lines that look good in almost any room, whether you fill your rooms with 18th-century stuff or Bauhaus. Campaign furniture fits in everywhere, across the globe and in every time period.

I think that’s true in part because it was truly an international furniture style. The roots of the style might indeed be related to tansu, as some have suggested, or in Chinese traveling forms, as others contend. But what is certain is that when Asian craftsmen saw these British forms they reinterpreted them for their customers. When their customers took these pieces back to England, the cabinetmakers there were influenced by the changes made by their far-flung brothers. And so forth and so on.

When I finally made that last connection to that circle, I didn’t feel so stupid about assuming that my grandparents’ campaign furniture was from Asia.

Regency chest. Even later chests, such as this circa 1820 Regency example, weren’t immune to changes in furniture style. Note the reeding throughout and the inset brass pulls that closely resemble traditional swan’s neck pulls. (Courtesy of Christopher Clarke Antiques)

It is my hope that this book opens your eyes to a style of furniture that was around for about 200 years – 1740 to World War II by some reckonings – and remains sturdy and stylish (if somewhat underappreciated) today.

This book is not an academic investigation of this furniture style – I will leave that desperately needed task to more capable researchers. Instead, this book is a too-short look at the furniture style from a builder’s perspective. My interest is in the wood, the hardware, the joinery and the different forms themselves.

I think that if you put your hand to building these pieces to the high standards of the 18th and 19th centuries, you will become fascinated – might I say “infected” – by their cleverness and soundness of construction.

Campaign furniture was meant to endure a mobile existence and do it with a bit of grace. To be sure, we are a more mobile society now than we were 200 years ago and sorely need furniture that is easy to move. And if you have bought any furniture in the last 50 years, you also know that most factory furniture is doomed to self-destruct within a few years.

We need campaign furniture more than ever before. Fill your house with it, and the ideals it embodies – sturdiness, simplicity and beauty – might just seep into the unconscious minds of your children or grandchildren as it did for me.

Workbenches: 16-18th Centuries

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
Note the notch. Other benches feature a notch on the long edge of
the benchtop that could be used for cutting tenons or sawing out fretwork. This
illustration is from about 1505 in Nuremburg. The painting is the “Holy
Family,” part of a 10-panel work by Bernhard Strigel.
PAINTING: GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM,
NÜRNBERG (LEIHGABE DER BAYERISCHEN STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNG)

The following is excerpted from “Ingenious Mechanicks,” by Christopher Schwarz. This book is a journey into the past. It takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench, and finally to Christopher’s shop in Covington, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs. This specific excerpt is by Suzanne Ellison who is a regular poster for Lost Art Press and did historical research for the book.

It is not surprising to see low Roman workbenches in Italy or any of the former Roman provinces. By mapping our bench discoveries, we found a strong relationship to locations along the Roman roads and trade routes that continued into the early decades of the 18th century.

After mapping the Spanish workbenches, I put an overlay of the Roman roads of Hispania and found, with a few exceptions, the plot points fell along or very near the Via Augusta (formerly the Via Herculea). Via Augusta, one of the major commercial Roman roads, ran along the Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees in the northeast, through Valencia, diverted inland to Seville and ended back on the coast at Cadiz. Eight workbenches fall along the Via Augusta, with six benches from Valencia and Seville.

Via Augusta. Many workbenches we found in Spain showed up along the Roman road called Via Augusta (in red). MAPS BY BRENDAN GAFFNEY

Of the 38 low, Roman-type workbenches we espied, we found 21 benches (or 55 percent) that date from the first decade of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. You can thank St. Joseph for that. Thirteen benches were in paintings from Italy and eight from Spain. But wait, the Kingdom of Naples was part of the Spanish Empire for most of the 1442 to 1714 time period. We have cross-pollination! For instance, Jose de Ribera, a major artist from Valencia, completed his mature work in Naples. Luca Giordano, from Naples, spent a decade in Madrid as court painter for Charles II. Adjusting the numbers results in almost a 50-50 split, with 10 benches for Italy and 11 for Spain.

The Limes. The northern border of the Roman Empire – the dotted line above – was called the Limes Germanicus. Here you can see the benches and their relationship to the frontier.

Some features of the low Italian and Spanish workbenches are a massive top with or without a face vise, a twin-screw vise, an early crochet (possibly the earliest depiction so far) and unusual planing stops. Oh yes, two benches with squared-off notches on the bench ends also turned up in our searches. One of the benches would help solve those mysterious notches on the 2nd-century Roman workbench from Saalburg.

The Mystery of the Notches

Beginning with the extant Saalburg workbench, we found seven benches with notches on the side or end of the benchtop. The Saalburg bench and three 16th-century benches have a fairly close regional distribution, while the examples with a notch in the bench ends are from Italy and Spain. The seventh bench has a side notch and originates from the New Kingdom of Granada in present-day Colombia.

The three 16th-century notched benches are from Memmingen (“Holy Family” by Bernhard Strigel), Nürnberg (Löffelholz bench) in southwest Germany and Bolzano (the Hans Kipferle panel) in northern Italy. The German benches are both dated 1505 and the Italian bench is dated 1561. When these benches are mapped along with the Saalburg bench, possible connections start to emerge. The Via Claudia Augusta, the Roman road that connected the Po River valley with the Raetia province (southern Germany), ran through Bolzano and across the Alps (it is a different road than Via Augusta). The road terminated at the capital of Raetia, Augusta Vindelicorum (present-day Augsburg). A branch off Via Claudia Augusta leads to the Roman city that became Kempten, just south of Memmingen.

Through the Middle Ages, the two main routes to cross the Alps converged in Bolzano and led to Augsburg: the Via Claudia Augusta through the Reschenpass and the Brenner route through the Brenner Pass. East-west Roman roads through Augsburg later also became important trade routes, turning the city into a commercial center. Similarly, Nürnberg benefited from the northsouth trade route it shared with Augsburg. The route was a portion of the Amber Road that linked southern Italy with the north and Baltic Seas. Trade routes were also information routes for cultures and technology. In the 15th and 16th centuries, this part of the former Roman Empire (and later Holy Roman Empire) experienced a cultural flowering. Considering the lengthy Roman presence in this region and the continued use of the trade routes, it is possible the side-notch feature survived and was in use on woodworking benches until at least the mid-16th century.

Local color. Keep your eyes open when in museums. Thanks to Suzanne Ellison’s sharp eye, this painting provided an important clue about the use of notches in workbenches. And the painting happened to be right up the road from me in Indianapolis.

The two end notches were in paintings from Ravenna, Italy, and Madrid, Spain. The Madrid painting, “Dream of Saint Joseph,” by Luca Giordano, shows a wedge in the notch and was a key to solving the “Saalburg mystery.” I found the image in mid-July and sent it with a few dozen other images to Chris. About a month later while verifying dates, titles, artists and locations of all the paintings I gave “The Dream” a closer look. St. Joseph’s side of the painting has an appealing composition with tremendous detail. One tremendous detail struck me in particular and that evening I emailed Chris asking if he had seen this detail before. The next morning he answered, and you can read about how the notches and wedges work in Chapter 5.

The last bench is from the New World when Colombia was a Spanish colony. The notch is sharply defined and dovetail-shaped. The email I sent to Chris with the image was titled, “Oh Look! What is that Notch in the Bench?” and two minutes later Chris’ response was a joyful expletive.

The Dutch Tool Chest Gallery – A Sample

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
Jonathan Schneider

This is a an excerpt from Megan Fitzpatrick’s new book “Dutch Tool Chests.” I have been looking forward to its release for some time now and have finally had a chance to read through it. It is incredibly beautiful, which may not always be an applicable word for an instructional book, and clearly written. I appreciate this as one who is not a regular woodworker.

I will include bits of the instructional parts in later excerpts but for now I want to show off some fun pictures of Dutch tool chests that were submitted by LAP friends and readers. The options of how to make your tool chest more versatile seem endless after looking at these…not to mention some of the paint jobs! I only picked three at random but there are quite a few in the book to drool over.

I consider what I’ve presented in the preceding chapters to be the “base model” of the Dutch tool chest form – the Toyota Corolla, if you will. It will last you forever as-is, but might not be as comfortable in the long run as you’d desire.

This Dutch chest form is highly adaptable to different storage needs, sizes and aesthetics. And it sometimes serves, as you’ll see herein, as inspiration for variations that are at times but loosely inspired by the basic form.

I could not possibly cover all the possible storage options, bases, sizes, colors, wood choices and other creative decisions made by others who’ve built or adapted this form. So, I invited people to submit pictures of their chests, with detail pictures of their upgrades and clever ideas.

I present to you in the following pages as many of those as is practical – but without repeating too much of the same (I hope). But it turns out that many great minds think alike. So if you sent me pictures and I didn’t use them here, please know that I appreciate your submissions. It’s likely your chest isn’t blue, so I chose not to include it (just kidding). More likely is that the images simply weren’t large enough to use in print, or that there weren’t enough of them. But know that I nonetheless enjoyed seeing your work; I’m sorry if I couldn’t share it.

I hope the chests that follow (in no particular order) inspire you to build a Dutch tool chest and make it your own.

Jonathan Schneider

The chest is built from local (to Berlin) pine; the unpainted pieces are beech. There are pegged breadboard ends on the lid and fall front, and the dovetailed tray pulls out for easy access.

Note the groove in the drawer front’s center. That allows the drawer to be full depth, and it provides a sure path to guide the lock into its bottom recess. The lid-mounted saw till features cutouts that perfectly fit the blade guards.

Michael McCormick

McCormick’s walnut chest was made from “rough lumber, pretty much 90-percent unplugged,” he wrote. “It was exhausting.” Why the fancy wood? Because he had no climate-controlled shop space, McCormick’s chest lived in his family’s home office, where it needed to blend in as a piece of furniture.

The hardware is by John Switzer at Black Bear Forge.

McCormick says the lid board is the widest piece of walnut he’s ever found;
the breadboard ends have kept it flat. Note the hanger for the tool brush, and the slotted hanging rack, which allows McCormick to slide wide chisels into a small hole.
In the bottom, McCormick made stalls for his
shoulder plane, tongue-and-groove plane and router plane.

Olivia Bradley

The Dutch tool chest is the perfect size for Bradley’s small shop; she’s customized the interior to hold a lot in the chest’s relatively small footprint – but the interior is still flexible enough that she can stock it as needed for various classes. The elastic bands on the lid and fall front, which can be used for a number of tools, are inspired by toolmaker Liam Rickerby, who ships his winding sticks corralled by bands.

“When I got back from a stick chair class” at Lost Art Press writes Bradley, “I finally finished the cart to go under the Dutch tool chest. I needed a place to put [more] stickers.”

There’s a magnet embedded in Bradley’s lock, by which it sticks to a nail on the front of the chest when it’s not securing the fall front. The drawers in the lower compartment pull all the way out for easy access.
Against a side wall, a rack with 1″-dia. holes
houses wider tools and bits. Also shown here
is Bradley’s three-sided pencil box; the bottom
is screwed to the shelf below.