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).
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.
This isn’t a tutorial on dovetails. The world needs another one of those like we need another portal to hell below an abandoned Chi-Chi’s.
Instead, this blog entry is about some of the details that are specific to making a tool chest. So not all these bullet points apply to drawers or other casework.
Gang Cut Your Tails I’m indifferent as to which part of the joint I cut first. It really depends on the type of dovetail joint. When I cut massive dovetails for a tool chest, I cut my tails first because I can gang-cut the tails. When I introduced this idea to my classes on building tool chests, we saved almost a day.
The only downside to dovetailing through 2” of pine is that the sawdust can pack into the gullets of your saw and stop the cutting action. Here’s how to avoid this problem with the flick of the wrist. Once you are about 1/8” deep into the kerf, begin lifting the saw a smidge on your return stroke. This allows the sawdust to fall from the teeth and clears your gullets.
Also, here’s a tip when gang cutting: Clamp the boards together as shown above when inserting and removing the boards in your vise. This makes it effortless to keep the boards aligned throughout the cutting.
A Joint in the Tails Many old books on building tool chests recommend you stagger any glue lines in your panels for a tool chest so that the entire chest doesn’t split in the middle if/when your glue fails.
I have seen many pieces of messed-up old furniture, but I have never seen a glue-line failure on four panels. So I generally don’t worry about this advice.
I do, however, try to bury the glue line in the middle of a tail. If your glue is sub-optimal you don’t want it running through the sloping wall of a tail. A piece of your tail could break off during assembly. This I have seen.
Chop to the Side of Your Chisel If you stand at the end of your panel while chopping then you have no clue if your chisel is 90° to the surface of the panel. You need to stand or sit to the side so you can see if the chisel is 90° or some other angle if you are undercutting the floor of the joint.
Good Marks Finally, I recommend you use traditional marriage marks on the edges of your panels. By looking at these marks you can instantly see if you have your panels messed up. I have watched hundreds of students ignore my advice and use their own A-A, B-B, C-D system and mess things up royally at glue-up. No marking system is perfect, but marriage marks are the best method I’ve found.
Plus, it’s a universal language. I can see if someone is screwing things up from across a room and attempt to save them if they are using marriage marks. If your marking system involves emojis, Pokemon and the compass rose, only Squirtle can save your butt.
Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the details of tool chest construction.
When building a tool chest, it’s tempting to get to the dovetailing as soon as possible. However, the work you do before the dovetailing is more important in the long run. (Even crappy dovetails hold nicely after hundreds of years.) And so I’m afraid we’re going to talk about a topic that bores people to tears: stock preparation.
Stock Selection I use white pine for tool chests whenever possible. It’s lightweight, easy to work and plenty strong. My second choice is poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), which is dirt cheap here in Kentucky. Poplar is easy to work and available in wide widths. The major downside to poplar is its smell. Some people find its odor to be as pleasing as dog poo. It doesn’t bother me.
Crosscut in the Rough After I purchase my stock, I immediately crosscut it to length while it’s still rough and sticker it for a couple weeks in the driest area of my shop. I check the moisture content with a meter to ensure I don’t encounter any surprises. Boards move the most while losing their last few bits of moisture as they reach equilibrium. So let them do this while in the rough.
Making Panels Tool chests are painted, so you don’t have to fuss over the grain patterns in the panels. But you should fuss over the grain direction. After jointing and planing the boards to size, orient the boards in each panel so the grain direction runs the same way.
Also, and I know this will make people howl, orient the heart side of the boards so they will face the outside of the tool chest. Doing this will ensure the corners of your tool chest will stay as tight as possible. That’s because when boards warp, the bark side becomes concave and the heart side becomes convex. So putting the heart side facing out will force the corners of your carcase together. If the bark side faces out there is a danger that the corners will open.
This is a fine detail because the carcase is enclosed by dovetailed skirting. But you might as well do it right.
The heart side of all your boards should face out. I know this is blasphemy among modern woodworkers.
Squaring and Planing After your panels are glued up, square them up. Don’t trust your machines to do this. Check the ends with a reliable framing square and tweak the panels with a handplane. Then remove all the machine marks on the boards’ faces with a handplane. Do this before dovetailing.
If you handplane your panels after dovetailing, you can create gaps in your joints. You can plane the tailboards without creating gaps, but planing the pinboards after the joints are cut is asking for trouble.
With your panels square and clean, you are ready to cut dovetails. Details on that operation next.
