Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

During the last five years, I’ve made considerable changes to the innards of the tool chests I build for customers. Most of these changes are details, really, but they are informed by the fact that I work out of a tool chest every day.

The most significant of the changes is in the runners for the three tills. On the original chest, the runners for the lower till didn’t extend all the way from front to back. They stopped at the saw till (see above).

The reason for this was to imitate several historical chests that also had a door to the lower parts of the chest. After building the chest with the door, I found it silly. So I removed it. But I was stuck with the runners.

Now when I build a chest, I make all three runners run from the front to the back.

The other change to the runners is that I now bead the top edge of each runner. It looks nice, and the rounded edge prevents the runners from splintering in service.

This is quick work with a 3/16” beading plane.

Next up: The sawtill. It’s smaller and has less room for your weed stash.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor, Lost Art Press
Personal site: christophermschwarz.com

 

Getting the lid, the dust seal, the carcase and the top skirt of the tool chest all working in tandem requires some care. Small errors compound quickly.

In the end, the lid should overhang the carcase by about 1/16” on its front and ends before you attach the dust seal. Sometimes you have to trim the lid. Sometimes you have to trim the carcase.

Trimming the lid is straightforward. Mark what you want to remove and plane it away.

Trimming the carcase can be trickier. On one carcase on my bench today, the lid was out of square by less than 1/16” over its 24” width. The best solution was to trim the carcase. But the wood that needed to be removed was a thin taper that started at less than 1/16” at one end and diminished to nothing at the other end.

To mark this out I use blue tape.

I first used a knife to mark where the taper should begin. Then I laid the tape down on the edge of the carcase. I put a shoulder plane on the carcase. Because of the tape, I can easily see the wood I need to remove (even with 49-year-old eyes). If I get any blue tape in the mouth of the plane, I know I’ve gone too far.

The Dust Seal
The dust seal is dovetailed at the two front corners and wraps around three edges of the lid. With these two particular chests, the dust seal is 1-3/8” wide. The problem here is the slope of the dovetails.

Usually I use a 1:4 slope for dovetails (about 14°). The problem is that the slope is a little extreme for a piece of wood 1-3/8” wide. So I use a less-radical slope, 1:8 or about 7°. This slope makes the base of the dovetail a good deal beefier.

While I’ve gotten away with a 1:4 slope on the dust seal, it looks like a pencil-necked chicken.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the other small design changes I’ve made to my tool chest design is to bevel the top edge of the lid’s panel. It’s a 30° bevel with a 1/16” flat at the edge.

On the original chest, I merely rounded the panel’s corner with a block plane. It looks OK, but this bevel looks much better. By the way, the bevel on the panel is an echo of the 30° bevel on the chest’s skirts.

It’s Friday, and so my head is full of cottage cheese. When the cheese clears, I’ll write up an explanation of how the lid works. I’ve probably had more questions about that aspect of the chest than any other.

Personal Note
If you follow the comments on this blog, you might have noticed a little back-and-forth with a reader about some details of the chest. This entry is not to shame the reader – honest, Stan – but instead to explain how I deal with comments.

I don’t (and honestly cannot) answer every question that is lobbed at me on the blog, Facebook, Instagram or via vacuum tube. Here’s why:

Many questions are from the Google-impaired. Rather than shame them, I hope my silence encourages them to look for the answer on their own.

Sometimes answering a question will only encourage trolling, or will drag decent readers into a troll fight. I steer clear of those briar patches.

Sometimes I decline to answer questions directly and instead try to elucidate what I think is important about the question (and not the direct answer). I do this for a variety of reasons, including the fact that sometimes what I write gets taken out of context and spread around the Internet like cow dung.

And sometimes I don’t know the answer, so I just let the question be.

I don’t mean to be indirect or inscrutable, I simply took too many Zen Buddhism classes in college.

— Christopher Schwarz

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).

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

For the bottom boards I used 40mm nails from Lie-Nielsen. You can also buy them from Lee Valley. Or from Dictum in Germany.

I use a tapered drill bit to make the pilot hole. Its depth is about half the length of the nail (the nail has to do some of the work…).

After nailing on the bottom, I glue on the top skirt. This is much easier than gluing on the bottom skirt.

Next up: Making the lid. A process that mystifies some people.

— Christopher Schwarz