Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

Editor’s note: As promised, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are writing a series of blog entries that explain how we have improved the construction process for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” during the last nine years (and several hundred chests).

When I built my first tool chests, I dovetailed the carcase and then immediately nailed on the bottom boards. My goal was to use the bottom boards to pull the case square (if it needed it) and then hold it square as I attached the skirts around the outside.

The downside to this approach is that the bottom gets in the way of clamping the lower skirt to the carcase. Once we changed the order of operations, it became much easier to get the lower skirt attached to the carcase with few (if any gaps). Here’s what we do now:

1. Dovetail the carcase, level the joints and plane off any machine marks.
2. Assemble the carcase, and work like heck to get the case square at both its top and bottom. You need to check for square at both openings.
3. Dovetail the skirts, as per the book’s instructions.
4. Nail temporary 3/4”-thick blocks to the bottom rim of the carcase. These represent the future location of the bottom boards.
5. Glue the lower skirt in place, making sure it is flush with the temporary blocks mentioned above.
6. When the glue has dried, remove the blocks and put in the bottom boards.

We’ve also changed the bevel we cut on the skirts. In the original book I planed a 45° bevel on all the skirts. That’s fine, but a steep bevel looks much nicer. Now we use an approximately 30° bevel and leave a flat at the top of the bevel that’s about 3/16”. That flat area allows us to miter a 3/16” bead moulding around the skirt (if the customer wants it).

Bottom Boards

For many years, we made our own bottom boards for the chests and used shiplap joints or (my preference) tongue-and-groove joints on their long edges. Now we purchase ready-made tongue-and-groove pine boards from the home center. It’s cheaper and saves time.

The material is sometimes sold as pine “carsiding” in 1×6 or 1×8 sizes. You can find it in different grades. I suspect they are No. 1 and No. 2 grades, but they aren’t always marked that way in the store. You’ll know when you find No. 2. It looks like No. 2 (yes, that’s a scatalogical joke).

Rot Strips

On the original chest, the rot strips were installed flush to the bottom edge of the lower skirt. Now we make the bottom boards flush to the bottom edge of the lower skirts. And the rot strips are proud of the skirts. This new arrangement prevents the skirts from getting wet and rotting. And the rot strips are now easier to replace when they get funky.

Finally, we now plane a 45° bevel on the long edges of the rot strips to make it easier to slide the finished chest across the shop floor.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s note: As promised, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are writing a series of blog entries that explain how we have improved the construction process for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” during the last nine years (and several hundred chests).

First, let’s get this out of the way: When I wrote “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” I didn’t think many people would build the damn thing. The chest was intended more as an idea. I love using floor chests, but I thought they would be a hard sell with readers. I was wrong.

When I started teaching classes on building the chest – the first class was in Germany before the book even came out – I struggled to get the students with a finished chest and lid after five days (never mind the interior tills and trays).

That forced me (and later Megan Fitzpatrick, who now teaches the tool chest classes) to rethink the process and see if we could make a chest in five days without using the “punishment whip” on the students. The first change I made (which saved a whole day of work) was to change the dovetails.

In the book, I used 13 dovetails at each corner – that’s 52 dovetails for the basic shell. And it is overkill. Nowadays we use seven dovetails at each corner. The chest is – in my opinion – just as strong. And most students assemble the shell by the end of the second day.

The second change was to eliminate the shallow rabbet I cut on the ends of the tail boards. The shallow rabbet assists in transferring the tail shape to the pinboards. In the book I show how to cut the rabbet on a table saw and with a rabbet plane.

When I started teaching this method, I found that most students had never used a rabbet plane. And so all their rabbets sloped down. Horribly. Chaos and gappy joints ensued.

Now I have the students temporarily tack a yardstick to the baseline of the tailboard (I call this the “Other Ruler Trick”). This helps everyone make the transfer with ease. No sloping rabbets. And no one locks themselves in the bathroom sobbing (not even me!).

— Christopher Schwarz

We now have “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” back in stock in our Indiana warehouse. This is the 12th printing of this little 6” x 9” book, which allowed me to quit my corporate job and has helped fund all of the books in our roster in some way.

I owe thanks to all the readers who have bought copies – for themselves, friends and relatives. I’m told that the book has helped people quit their jobs, renewed their love of woodworking and shown them a path in the craft that doesn’t require a warehouse full of machinery.

And I also tip my hat to the critics, many of whom never read the book, but were so turned off by the book’s title that they foamed at the mouth. Your rabies made other people curious.

The Bad Idea
Earlier this year I went to Chicago to visit my friend Narayan Nayar, who took some of the beautiful photos in the book, and we went out for tacos (one of five meals we ate that day). As the snow fell outside of the Oak Park taco joint, I laid out some of the book ideas that had been brewing in my head for the last 12 months.

Narayan is a good listener and lets me wind it all out without interrupting. Some (OK, many) of my book ideas are daft. And when I pitch ideas to other people they come in with the long knives before I can explain myself.

One of the book ideas was a 10th anniversary edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The front of the book would get some mild updates. The back of the book – on building the chest – would be completely redone. I’ve built so many of these chests that I’ve come up with many simpler ways to do some of the operations. I’ve made small changes to the skirts and lid. The chest is now easier to build and looks better.

Plus, the new edition would also contain plans for the Dutch tool chest. It was my original goal when writing the book to have two tool chest plans. Just like I had two workbench plans in “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use.” But “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” got so lengthy after building one tool chest that I decided to omit it.

I published the Dutch tool chest in Popular Woodworking Magazine in a short article. And lots of other people have built it – it might be my most successful project. But I’ve never gotten to fully explain the design (there was no room in the magazine article), its origin and its many variants.

After I pitched all this to Narayan, he asked me a question. That question made something click in my head. Narayan joked that he actually could hear the click from across the table.

The anniversary edition will have to wait – maybe for the 15th or 20th anniversary. Narayan’s question set me off on another book idea that has consumed all my evenings since.

— Christopher Schwarz

Anyone who has read “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” or worked in my shop knows that I dislike French-fitted cubbyholes for tools. I prefer my tools to roam free and migrate amongst my tills as they rise and fall in importance to the job at hand.

I still think this way, but this morning I took a small step to both corral my pencils and tip my hat to my Lie-Nielsen 60-1/2 block plane. I added a small oak divider to keep my pencils, knives and 6” rules in one spot. And I added a smaller divider for my block plane at the other end of the till.

The pencil divider has been a long time coming. I hoard my mechanical pencils, rules and erasers and the like (you have to in a group shop or you will end up pencil-less). And like Nesquik or Tang, they soon dissolve into the rest of the till, hiding under the other tools and becoming invisible.

The divider for the block plane is simply an admission that this block plane has been with me for 23 years and isn’t going anywhere.

The dividers are oak scraps that I secured with headless brads only. So if this turns out to be a bad idea, it’s reversible.

One other small tip: to restrain and protect valuable tools, such as my sliding bevels, I keep them in small cardboard boxes. The boxes can migrate (a good thing) but they never become invisible (also a good thing).

OK, now to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to two industrious woodworkers, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” has become our first book to be translated into another language.

Titled “Die Werkzeugkiste des Anarchisten,” the book is published by HolzWerken and is now available for sale. It was translated by Andy Kevill and Martin Gerhards who spent a great deal of time trying to get the tone right, as well as the technical stuff.

I’m pleased also with the look of the book – the publisher took pains to capture the feel of the English edition. This is somewhat unusual. Many times translations become something else entirely. And sometimes it’s horrible.

Other publishers have approached us about translating some Lost Art Press titles into French, Korean and Chinese. So who knows what other culture will learn about tube tops and tool-shaped objects?

— Christopher Schwarz