“Let us hope that the spirit of craftsmanship is strong enough in us to enable us to hand down to posterity things which will be considered worthy of the 20th century.”
— Charles Hayward, “Practical Veneering”
Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest
Classes on Building a Tool Chest
Several readers have asked where I’ll be teaching classes in 2012 on how to build a tool chest, so here is an update.
A couple notes on the class itself. If you don’t like cutting dovetails, you might want to reconsider. A good chunk of the class is a Bataan Death March of sawing and chopping. But by golly, you will be able to cut dovetails in a coma when it’s over.
It’s absolutely OK if this tool chest class is your first project. You’ll do fine.
If the class is filled up and you really want to attend, please sign up for the waiting list. Classes always have “churn.” Some people drop out because of a family event (marriage, surgery, divorce, graduation etc.). Others misread the class description (“I thought it was the ‘Anachronist’s Tool Chest,’ and I wear my +1 chainmail to bed”). So if you get on the waiting list for the class, there is a good chance you’ll get in.
And lastly, you will have a choice as to which chest you build: the full-size chest illustrated in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” or the traveling-size chest I posted in this blog entry.
So here’s the line-up:
Feb. 20-24, 2012, at The Woodwright’s School. Roy’s calendar shows slightly different days, but he hasn’t updated his online calendar yet.
July 30-Aug. 3, 2012, at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking. This class is listed as full, but get on the waiting list if you are serious. Trust me on this. “I thought it was ‘The Atavist’s Tool Chest.’”
Sept. 6-10, 2012, at The Woodwright’s School.
And if your year is already full, I’m working on my 2013 schedule and already have plans to teach this class in Connecticut and am negotiating with some chaps/blokes in Australia.
— Christopher Schwarz
Anarchy in Denmark
While teaching my first class on building a tool chest at the Dictum workshops in Metten, Germany, this June I had a group of students that were nothing short of spectacular.
They were from all over the world: New Zealand, Chicago, Austria, Great Britain, the Netherlands and yes, Germany. And their woodworking experience was as varied as their nationalities. For some of them, this was their first significant woodworking project. And I had two professional woodworking instructors and a professional cabinetmaker from Dictum.
Despite – or perhaps because of – this diversity, it was one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever taught. I got to see European hand-tool techniques I’d only read about. I learned different ways of gluing up a dovetailed case from the Germans. And I was fascinated by the way the school puts all its flat panel stock in clamps overnight (like a giant sandwich).
Then there was the singing.
A father-son pair from Denmark took the class, even though neither had any business being there. The father was a long-time woodworking instructor. And his son, Jonas, could have taught the class himself. Jonas, a locomotive marine engineer, was both fast and accurate.
Jonas and his father would sing (in various languages) as they worked. In two-part harmony. And I cannot even whistle while I work.
If you want to see some videos from this class and hear them sing our National Anthem, read some of my posts on my blog at Popular Woodworking here.
Anyway, Jonas recently sent some photos of his completed tool chest. He was determined to make his own milk paint for the chest, which will be used as a blanket chest in his house.
“I tried to make some milk paint, but I couldn’t make it work,” Jonas wrote. “I am not sure whether to use slaked lime, lime fruit, powdered lime, Jura lime, hydraulic lime or maybe some other form of lime.
“But I found a recipe for egg-oil-tempera that even I couldn’t screw up: one egg, the equivalent volume of boiled linseed oil and the equivalent volume of milk. I did manage to mix a disastrous color though, so could you please issue a warning not to mix one batch of egg-oil-tempera with 8 tablespoons of zinc oxide (white) and 4 tablespoons iron oxide (Bordeaux red). the result is as you can see not a pleasant sight.
“It was intended to be used as a primer, so I am hoping that I can fix it by mixing some light grey paint to cover most of the purple.”
Jonas promised to send photos of the chest in its finished color.
I know this will sound corny, but classes like this give me hope for the future, of both the craft and humanity. That no matter how impersonal, hierarchical and technological our world will become, there will always be a class of people who are bound together by the work our hands produce. There will be parents who teach their children. And for those people, I can report that our similarities are more significant than our differences.
— Christopher Schwarz
Download Plans for the Traveling Tool Chest
During 2012 I’ll be teaching three classes in building a traditional tool chest. Students will be able to build either the full-size chest from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” or the slightly smaller chest shown here that is designed for traveling.
This chest is based on a historical example I own, and I’ve been surprised at how many tools it can carry. It will hold almost all the tools of a full-size chest, but getting to all these tools isn’t as easy as it is in a full-size chest.
But this smaller chest will fit in a hatchback – something a full-size chest can’t do.
This chest has some interesting features worth exploring. Let’s take a look.
• There are two sliding trays for your small tools, which slide on runners that are screwed to the inside of the chest. In the original, these trays are nailed together (not dovetailed). When I build this chest for my own travels, I will dovetail the trays together.
• The trays are ingeniously positioned so you can fit moulding planes and typical bench planes below the trays without interfering with the way they move. The downside is that the planes must be stored with their soles against the floor of the chest – so you won’t be able to see the profiles of all the moulding planes.
• The back wall of the chest has a tool rack that is pierced with 1/2” holes on 1-1/2” centers. This little rack gives you lots of space to store screwdrivers, awls and other tools with narrow blades. But if you fill the rack you will limit the travel of the sliding trays.
• The sawtill at the front of the chest is a single piece of wood. It holds three saws easily and without taking up much space at all.
• The real downside of the chest is that it is only 15-3/8” high. So if you store it on the floor, you’ll be doing a lot of crouching or bending over. If you store it on your benchtop, I hope you have a huge bench. When I had a bench this size, I stored it on top of a wooden crate that was about 12” tall. That worked.
• The original chest was made of pine boards that were nailed together. I changed the joinery to dovetails. Also, though I don’t show it in the drawing, I recommend you dovetail all the skirting around the shell of the chest – just like I did on the full-size chest in the book.
You can download the plans for this chest for free from Google’s 3D Warehouse. You need Google SketchUp to view the files, but it’s free, too. And if you haven’t gotten your feet wet in SketchUp, I highly recommend you do so – it’s become the design language for woodworkers. [Editor’s note, 2021: The product is now owned by Trimble. There is still a free version available, though it is significantly less robust than the subscription versions.]
Click here to download the plans.
— Christopher Schwarz
But You Don’t
“You can have art in your daily life if you want it, but you don’t. You prefer fountain-pens and motor cars.”
— Eric Gill, the creator of the Gill Sans typeface, as quoted in “Country Craftsmen” by Freda Derrick (1945)