Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

Here’s a dirty secret: If it weren’t for my job at a woodworking magazine, I’d be almost unemployable.

I cannot sit for more than a few hours at a time. During long meetings and dinner parties, I’ve been known to just stand up and rudely leave the room. My legs feel like involuntary muscles when that happens.

So thank goodness for our shop at Popular Woodworking Magazine and my shop at home. I can abandon whatever sit-down task I’m working on and sharpen my tools, cut some moulding or work on the project on my bench.

On Thursday I had – no exaggeration – more than 200 e-mails to catch up with. After slaving on that all morning at the office, I shut down all the programs on my computer and decided to build a prototype of a shelving unit I spied in a French book on handplanes (see the story here).

It was just what my head and hands needed. I had some dry yellow pine 2x12s in our rack that were fairly clear. And I got down to work. I had only enough pine to build a 50-1/2″-long version of the rack – the one I designed is more than 70″ long. And I screwed the prototype together – the real one will have through-tenons etc. But this prototype will tell me how well it holds and dispenses tools and if it looks ungainly.

I wiped on some finish on Friday morning and hung it before lunch in my shop at home. I’ll probably put my shop-reference books on top of the shelf today and hang my two miter saws on the pegs so my miter boxes will take up less space below the bench.

I do like the way it looks on the wall. But looks go only so far.

Edit: SketchUp drawing download added:

FrenchToolShelf.zip (23.01 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Little wonder that after a short time the beginner in woodwork experiences a familiarity with his tools that not all his preliminary blunderings can quench. It comes not from the moment of time in which he experiments but way back through countless generations of his forbears to the unknown men who had nothing but their tools between them and bodily and defensive needs, having at the same time the urge to create and enjoy the thing they had created.

When the hand of modern man closes round a tool it is in the old traditional manner and in no time at all he finds himself falling into the rhythm of working action. Skill itself can only come with experience, but the potential skill is there, craving for an outlet.

— The Woodworker, March 1957

When a Craftsman of to-day sets to work to make a chair, the knowledge which he takes so much for granted is the stored-up inheritance of generations of craftsmen who had preceded him. He is profiting by their discoveries, their failures, and adding whatever of its own particular worth in new processes the present age has to offer.

Only in our own age the ratio of skilled craftsmen is diminishing, and with so much that is good and civilised in process of being destroyed, one wonders how much will survive.

— The Woodworker, February 1943

For the rules that appear to limit and bind stand as guides along the highway, safeguarding us from the waste and misuse of the material of our lives — our gifts and talents, our health and strength, and relationships with others. And the true freedom, which is the freedom to use our powers to the fullest extent, comes from observing them.

— The Woodworker, March 1955