Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

“Only when baron and priest had lost their power could private life, with freedom to build and adorn the home as the owner pleased, exist.”

— “Furniture and its Story” The Woodworker Series, page 77

Some readers are sure I was a little drunk when I designed the lower sliding till of my tool chest. Why didn’t I allow the lowest till to slide all the way forward? Heck, all I had to do was lower the wall of the sawtill an inch.

When researching tool chests for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” there were several features I saw on old chests that I considered adding to mine.

1. Putting a hinged lid on the top sliding tray. Why didn’t I do this? I had a lid like this on my first chest and disliked it. Horizontal surfaces get covered with stuff – particularly in a shop with several woodworkers. I was always cleaning off the lid to get to the tools below. So I nixed this lid.

2. Putting a sawtill on the underside of the lid of the chest. Why didn’t I do this? I have a sawtill on my old chest and am ambivalent about it. That particular sawtill – based on Benjamin Seaton’s example – likes to eat the horns of nice saws for breakfast. Plus I really wanted that space for my sliding trays.

3. Adding a sliding panel or door above the well of bench planes. This feature appears in many old chests and is touted as a way to protect your bench planes and to have a shelf in the chest to hold items overnight, such as your shop apron.

That sounds reasonable. So I built it.

And that is why the lowest tray of my chest doesn’t slide all the way forward. I built a nice raised-panel door and hinged it to the wall of the sawtill. The door came to rest on the lowest runners and acted as a stop for the lowest tray.

It looked clever on paper but it was immediately obvious that the door was a dumb thing. It impeded the travel of the trays above and added more hand motions for me to get to the bounty at the bottom of the chest.

So I removed the door.

Why didn’t I remake the guts of the chest to allow the lower tray to slide all the way forward? I’ve always meant to do that. It would be a quick fix – all of the chest’s interior parts are fit with friction and nails. But I haven’t felt the need. I simply keep the lowest tray at the back and the other trays at the front – it works fine.

There’s a lesson here, really. In dealing with the woodworking public since 1996 I can report that we like to complicate things. We add features or decorative details more readily than we will take them away.

Resist the urge to add cupholders to your tool chest. Instead, first try taking things away from a design.

And if you have to be drunk to do something that crazy, then so be it. I won’t judge.

— Christopher Schwarz

Of all the photographs of tool chests that have landed in my inbox since the summer, this one is my favorite so far.

Not because it’s a fairly faithful version of the chest I built from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” but because of the differences added by the maker, Jim Burton, an adjunct professor of art at the University of North Texas and a Libra.

Some of changes that Burton made are obvious: He built a sawtill in the lid for his bowsaw – a nice touch for an awkward-to-store tool. My solution was to break down the bowsaw into its components and store it in the drawer.

Other touches require a second look. He painted the inside rim of the chest’s lid. I wish I had done that; it frames the lid’s interior and makes it look more finished. Many of you will also clap your hands like you’re starring in “Romper Room” when you see what Burton did in the sawtill area inside the chest. Yes, he has a toggle for a backsaw. I remain too lazy/busy to do this myself. I just slide my backsaws between my panel saws, toe down. It ain’t elegant, but it is also inelegant.

Burton, who enjoys long bike rides and sci-fi movies, used white oak for the bottom boards of the chest, which is a smart move if your chest will ever encounter water – white oak resists rot quite well.

Thanks to Jim (and his wife who took the photos) for sharing photos of his chest. It takes guts to show your work in public.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I am shooting a series of 10 videos for Popular Woodworking Magazine on getting started in hand tools – everything from chisels to rasps to smoothing planes. So I have to pack up a whole shop of tools and fit it into my hatchback.

Enter the traveling tool chest.

This slightly smaller-sized tool chest fits about 80 percent of the tools of the full-size model that I built for the book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” Yet it does this in a chest that is about half the size. You can download the SketchUp plans for free here.

How does it perform this act of clown-car efficiency?

Well, like most things involving contorted clowns, it’s not pretty. All the tools are wedged into the chest but aren’t as easily accessed as they are in the full-size chest. Some planes are stacked on top of other planes. Some tools are wedged under other tools.

But the bottom line is that all the stuff you really need fits. When I get to my destination tomorrow I’m going to have to store a bunch of tools on the shelf below the workbench or even in the – shudder – tool well. But I’ll manage.

— Christopher Schwarz

Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

— The New York Times, “Human Nature’s Pathologist,” Nov. 28, 2011