When measuring my car and drawing up the plans for my first Dutch chest, I forgot two things: the handles and the caster assembly.
Which means, as you probably can guess, that the chest does not fit in my car.
After considering all the options – remake the handles, saw the chest in two like a lady at a magic show, going to Home Depot and buying tool bags – I concluded it would be faster (and more fun) to build a smaller Dutch chest.
This one is a mix between the first chest, some other historical examples and one that Roy Underhill owns that I examined last year (read about that chest here).
I also took the opportunity to try some different things in this chest.
1. The top has clamps (breadboard ends). I did this – instead of battens – to make a sawtill that was lower in profile.
2. The removable front panel has battens that extend beyond the bottom edge of the panel. These allow me to use a simpler locking mechanism (more on this later).
3. I used wrought nails from blacksmith Peter Ross. My one-word review: Dang.
Anyway, I’m going to paint this sucker today and will talk more about it in a bit.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Also, I’m going to build a lower unit for this chest – a la campaign furniture – after a suggestion from a reader.
It turns out that the Dutch Tool Chest I recently finished is a little larger than I needed.
Fully loaded with the tools I take on the road, it still had room for more. And it weighs only 116 pounds. That’s easy for two people to lift, and it is something I can lift with only a grunt or two.
The chest can also take a hard knock – the fully loaded chest tool a spill off the sawhorses today during weigh-in. The tools and chest took the hit with a lot of grace (yay, ductile iron!).
The top bin of the chest is where I’m sure most of you will be looking. The bench planes are separated by 3/8”-thick dividers. The till for the backsaws creates three compartments at the rear of the top bin. The left compartment is for tools you need all the time (pencils, knives, mallet etc.). The other two bins are for tools that might not see action every few minutes (feather files, dovetail markers, extra small drill bits etc.).
On the two shelves below are the rest of the tools – all the moulders and joinery planes, augers, hammer, carving tools, rasps, hand drill, brace and so forth. The delicate tools are protected by tool rolls. The other tools are cushioned by the tool rolls.
I’d rather have every tool have a discrete spot – wouldn’t we all? – but I know that the open architecture will be to my advantage until… whenever.
Also worth noting: Ty Black (my shop assistant) sewed up a canvas cover for the chest. I got that idea from my research into campaign furniture – chests would often have a fitted canvas cover. My cover is designed to protect both the chest and my car from damage.
The hinges are from Lee Valley and are temporary – I’ll replace them when some blacksmith-made ones arrive. I had to install these so the chest could make a trip to Columbus on Saturday morning to talk to the central Ohio woodworkers’ club. If you want to see the chest in person and are a member of the club, please stop by. I’ll have a special guest with me (it’s not Ty – he already has an obligation that day).
If you want to build a tool chest and you need some dominatrix-style “encouragement” to get it done inside of a week, then listen up.
There are about five spaces open in my tool chest class in August at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. This fantastic little school is located behind a Woodcraft store in Manchester, Ct. Run by furniture-maker Bob Van Dyke, this class attracts the creme de la creme of instructors. (This is code for: I should not be allowed to teach here.)
Take a look at the instructors.
OK? Wow, I know. So if you are ready to slum with me in Manchester, here’s what I can promise you: You will complete your tool chest. You will have some of the best dang pizza on the planet. You will have the opportunity to drink many adult beverages and talk shamelessly with other wood nerds about hand tools and woodworking.
Plus, the wood you use for your chest will be extraordinary. Bob Van Dyke, who runs the school, has the finest taste in wood and grain selection. The last time I taught there I was simply blown away by the stock we all got to work with.
So if you are free the week of Aug. 5-9 of this summer, give it some thought.
You can read more about the class here. You can register here.
The hardest part of building a traditional tool chest is to fit the 6”-wide lower skirt all the way around the dovetailed carcase. No matter how careful you are, it’s easy to end up with a gap between the skirt and case.
I have concocted at least five different ways to fight this gap.
1. Fill it with water putty.
2. Plow a groove around the dovetailed carcase where the top of the skirt goes. Glue a thin strip of wood to the inside of the skirt pieces at the top of the moulding that fits in the groove.
3. After assembling the carcase, run the whole thing through a wide-belt sander to true up the carcase.
4. Make the beveled section of the moulding a separate piece that you miter and nail on top of the dovetailed part of the skirt.
5. Add a 3/16” bead moulding that is stuck onto a 1/4” x 1/4” strip of wood – miter it at the corners.
This fifth solution is my favorite. Today I added this bead detail to a full-size tool chest I’m building for a customer. I had a small gap – a little less than 1/16” at one corner – between the lower skirt and the carcase. While the skirt looked tight in the dry-fit, something went wrong.
To fix it, stick the 3/16” bead onto the four long edges of a 1-1/2” x 1-1/2” x 48”-long piece of pine. Then rip the four corners off to make four pieces of 1/4” x 1/4” x 48” moulding. Miter, glue and nail it to the lower skirt.
The whole process took about 30 minutes. It adds a shadow line to the lower skirt and spares the water putty.
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.
