Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

Sometime in the late 1990s I had three full sets of chisels – Marples Blue Chips, Ashley Iles and some fine blue-steel Japanese chisels. But instead of enjoying the fact that I had more chisels than my father, grandfather or uncle, I was grumpy.

I was pissed (with myself) that I had three sets of chisels to maintain. Three sets to store. Three sets that would set me back in my efforts to master one set of chisels. All this was made worse by the fact that we had a water-cooled grinder in the shop. So every time I had a chip in a Blue Chip, I had to cool my jets for a half hour with the water-cooled hummer.

But it wasn’t just chisels.

No one needs five smoothing planes, two jointer planes, three jack planes and six shoulder planes to build ordinary furniture. That’s not a working set of tools, that’s a never-ending obligation to sharpen, tune and learn an overly large set of tools.

As one of my female friends put it: “Why are men always fantasizing about sleeping with two or three women? They can barely handle one.”

The same is true with tools. For the last several years I’ve been selling or giving away all of the excess tools that accumulated on my shelves as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine. I had bought those tools with my own money, and so I felt responsible for them. They had to be protected from rust and dust. They had to be lubricated occasionally. They had to be used, or I would feel guilt.

At first it was easy to sell the tools that I didn’t want to review in the magazine in the first place. Then came the tools I used on occasion. Then the tools that were made by people I really liked. And the tools that I was inexplicably attached to. Every time I thought I had gotten to the bare bones set of tools, I found I was wrong. I could get rid of more.

What proved me wrong? My tool chest.

When I defined my working set of tools as only the tools in my chest, I found myself becoming less of a zookeeper and more of a woodworker. I now know exactly how much backlash is in every metallic plane I own. When I pick up each of my planes, I can tell if someone else has been using them – I don’t know how. Because I have one jointer, one jack and two smoothing planes, I spend less time sharpening and cleaning and lubricating, and I spend more time building.

Some of this drivel above might sound like a rehash of themes from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – and perhaps it is. But I can tell you that after two years of working with a small set of tools, these ideas have become even more entrenched in my day-to-day life.

And here’s the important part: As I have become more skilled with the basic set of tools, I see no need (for me) to buy specialty tools.

It’s the specialty tools that can get you. The Stanley 98/99 planes sure look handy to widen dados. But instead I just make the mating shelf thinner with my jack. A bullnose plane looks good for cleaning up stopped rabbets, but chisels are just as fast. Dado planes look like a quick way to knock a carcase together. A sash saw and chisel, however, are almost as fast and are already sharp and set up.

I could go on like this for pages and pages when it comes to specialty tools.

I’m not saying that specialty tools shouldn’t exist – if you do repair work most of the day, you probably are going to need a chisel plane. But if your work isn’t specialized (note that I didn’t say “special”), I think that specialty tools should be way low on your list of things to acquire, down next to “gut punch” and “recreational colonoscopy.”

Caveat: OK, if you like to collect tools and that makes you happy, then by all means collect tools. Collect thousands of them. Take care of them, preserve them for future generations and learn all you can about them. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you need all of them if you really just want to build chests, cabinets, tables and chairs.

If construction (not collecting) is your goal, find some way to limit yourself – a tool chest is one way – so you can be a better builder than you are a consumer.

— Christopher Schwarz

Looking around at contemporary furniture, one is more and more conscious of how little there is of really pleasant, comfortable attractive design for the ordinary men and women who want just that in their home and can feel no enthusiasm for freakishness or oddity or the bleakness of peg-legs and the like in the furniture they have to live with.

And how utterly bleak those peg-legs will look when the novelty and newness have worn off and only the barren, unimaginative ugliness remains.

— The Woodworker, August 1954

Between bouts of loading 6,000 pounds of books, several holiday dinners and shoveling snow, I managed to make some progress on the Dutch tool chest.

I added two coats of General Finishes Milk Paint – lamp black color. I have serious doubts how much “milk” is in this paint, but the stuff is easy to brush or spray when wet, and it is tough as heck when dry. Plus it has that chalky look in the end.

I added one tool rack in the top area of the chest (with another to come) and made some handles. I wanted to use oak for the handles, but I have so many mahogany scraps left from building Roorkhee chairs this year that I couldn’t imagine going out and buying a plank of 8/4 oak for this.

The handles aren’t really Dutch. I made mine to look like old bearing blocks or maybe a mantle clock. The ends were laid out using basic geometry and a compass. The round bits are scraps from Roorkhee chair stretchers that I turned down to size and added a couple details.

I’ll make the saw till for the lid tonight. Then I’ll set the project aside to wait for the hinges and hasp.

Next up: A portable workbench.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The casters are NOS (new old stock) stuff from the 1940s that I found on eBay. They are made in America, move as smoothly as a goose on ex-lax and cost me less than $20.

From WANDERING WOOD BUTCHER, Alexandria, La. In looking over the issue for December last, I noticed a plan of a tool chest furnished by “R. S. M.” of Dover,
Mass., which is only one of many plans that have appeared in the paper during the past 20 years. These have greatly interested me, but I observe that in nearly all cases one thing, which in my opinion leaves the chest incomplete, has been omitted, and that is an ample shoulder box or tray for carrying the tools to and from the place of work – a box 10 inches deep by 12 inches wide, which can be dropped into a chest as a tray or till when the day’s work is over, the key turned and the carpenter can go away at peace with himself and his fellow men. I dislike to see a carpenter come on a job in the morning with a hand full of tools and then make 10 to 15 trips during the day to the chest for more. Then when noon or night comes he is running all over the building, fussing with the other men about his tools being lost, stolen, or mislaid. If he is lucky enough to find them in the dark, or even the light, be has to drag them to his chest, possibly necessitating two trips in the operation. Such a chest is a poor excuse, no matter how nicely made and trimmed. In the box as above de­scribed a carpenter can take such tools as he usually requires, or the nature of the particular work demands, to any part of the building and have them always ready at hand. When the words “pick up” are given, he can do so in an instant and go home rejoicing, instead of feeling annoyed at the necessity of having been obliged to grope around in the rubbish for his tools. Another thing I might suggest in connection with tool chests is not to put such panel tops on them, but cover with galvanized iron so far as to make the chest sun proof and water proof, and baggage smasher proof, if good comer irons of the same material are put on with clout nails and clinched.

If one cannot have his chest arranged as above de­scribed, I would suggest at least having one of which he ­will not be ashamed to take it to a job or among strangers as an example of workmanship, skill and taste. Of late years it is not an uncommon sight to see men calling
themselves carpenters coming on a job with a gunny sack for a tool chest, or an old box picked up in the backyard of some store with the name of the manufacturer of snuff, tobacco, boots and shoes, or some other commodity printed all over it until it looks like a bill board or traveling advertisement. If for the latter purpose it is a great hit and a success, for it announces to every beholder that the owner is a hobo, tramp or fraud who­ travels for notoriety as a wandering wood butcher. Another thing I would suggest to the young chips is that if they cannot have many tools, make sure to have good ones and keep them in good order and looking clean. Do not be like two of those wandering wood butchers who by letter applied to me a few years ago for a job and described themselves “carpenters by profession.” I brought them 150 miles to work and found they had pieces of limbs of trees with the bark on for hammer handles and as soon as they landed took a saw in one hand and a file in another and went to nearly every man in the town, from the Section Boss to the Town Marshal, saying “Please, Mister, will you file me a saw?” Now the reader may not be able to understand the sort of an impression they made on the foreman, or what remarks the rest of the crew made about the foreman’s new hands, but I do. I did not hear the last of them for a year and even now I meet some one who refers to my “imported carpenters.” I would say to the young chip, though be he not a full-fledged carpenter, do not be ashamed or afraid to own up. Tell the boss the truth and nine times out of ten he will help you through, for he himself had to learn by having others show him. If you lie to him he will catch you in the course of time and then one may expect to hear some hard remarks. Right here is the reason some foremen are considered hard to work for and why they get a hard name. When you hear a man speaking hard of a foreman, you may safely assume there is something wrong with himself.

— Carpentry and Building, April 1903. Thanks to Jeff Burks for unearthing this gem.

I received the greatest gift today – I was freed from the obligation to see “Les Miserables.” So while all the fallopian-tubed individuals left the house for three hours, I beavered away on this Dutch tool chest.

I got the removable front panel complete and filled the house with the luxurious smell of turpentine after I cut into my special stash of old-growth yellow pine.

Usually when I build a tool chest, I use a white pine for the carcase and white oak for the parts that see abrasive wear (drawer runners etc.). But for this chest I decided to use some old yellow pine I scored this year. The pine was old growth – at least 30 rings to the inch – that had been reclaimed for a house job. I got the scraps.

This stuff is nothing like the yellow pine at the home centers. It is heavier than most maples, incredibly stable and tough. If I could find enough of it, I’d build another workbench out of it – it’s that good.

For this tool chest, I used yellow pine for the battens on the front and the locking mechanism that secures the front tight. I also used yellow pine for the two strips on the bottom of the chest.

And now to cook dinner.

If I don’t drink too much Maudite, I might have time to dress the chest lid (it’s still in the rough) and add the thumbnail profile to its edges.

— Christopher Schwarz