Lost Art Press

A while back I sent you pictures of an old tool chest I was able to get, and I thought you might like to see the mostly finished chest. It was in rough shape and needed a lot of work. I have been diligently plugging away at it as best as one can who has two small boys and a full time job. Now I finally have it mostly done, am working out of it, and I think it looks pretty good considering what I started with. I hope this is not imposing too much but I sent you a video I made about the chest, this seemed the best way to show folks about it. Sorry about the larger file size, just let me know if you’d prefer a photo or two instead.

I feel like the chest is about 100 years old, based on the size and quality of the boards used in it, but I am only guessing. My feeling is that the original owner was more a carpenter than a joiner, and I suspect the sides are just nailed together under those metal plates. I had to repair the lock mortice, replace a missing portion of the rails that the tills slide on, repair the upper skirt, replace the casters, and, oh well you get the idea. I stripped as much of the paint as I could get out from the interior, and the wood is beautiful! The outside was repainted with Federal Blue milk paint and the hardware cleaned up.

Due to the depth of the lid I opted to store some tools there, and I may add a few more. My saw till tilts out so that the larger saws can be removed without any difficulty.  I also made some gravity-actuated turn-buttons on the saw till to keep the saws from sliding out in the event the chest is jostled while closed. I am limited with the tills in that they are all the same depth, and one day I may make a new bottom till that is step-sided so that I can make it deeper. I am also a bit limited with the depth of the bottom area, as the moulding planes cannot be placed on their ends. I do plan on adding a dividing wall to the center of the main well to separate the space and hang some tools like my draw knife. I do like the little side latch, the finger recesses in the back wall, and the external lid support

Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience with you, since I blame you for getting this tool chest idea in my head (that is a good thing, though). I bought the ePub version of your book and I really enjoyed it, well done. I am in love with the tool chest idea – it is absolutely the best option I have in my very limited space, and I am enjoying working out of it. Thanks too for all you do for the woodworking community. On my recommendation the academic library that I work for has purchased some of the books from you at LAP and we are hopefully going to order “Mouldings in Practice” next. Keep up the good work and thanks again!

– Jason Stamper

Reader Jason Frantz of WoodShop Artisans sent me a photo of a tool chest that has been in his family for many years. The corners are bound with brass plate, both on the main carcase and on the plinth, upper skirt and dust seal on the lid.

I like the cove shapes that the owner cut into the brass plate. It’s a nice touch on what could otherwise be a pedestrian job. Thanks Jason!

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s raining. I have Lost Art Press’s world-class collection of tarps at the ready. But the truck that’s supposed to deliver “Mouldings in Practice” hasn’t shown up. Perhaps the driver is waiting for a thunderstorm to kick in before backing a semi down my street.

So instead of drinking some of the beer from the Upper Midwest that a student brought me, I attached the steel binding to the Traveling Anarchist’s Tool Chest. I stink at metalwork, so I took my time hacksawing all the pieces to length and drilling the bores and counterbores.

As a result, this was a fussy three-hour job for me.

I’m fairly happy with the results, however. I managed to get almost all the counterbores at the right depth, and the screws from blacksmithbolt.com look great. The only task that is left is to file the metal corners flush and remove any snaggy bits that might bite me or my students.

Now I get to turn my attention to the chest’s interior fittings. I tried to dig up enough pine for the sliding tills from my wood rack, but I’m still awash in mahogany from building campaign furniture. I know I’m going to catch some grief for using such a bourgeois wood on a proletariat project, but I don’t want to buy more pine and wait for it acclimate.

So mahogany tills, here I come. Now where did I put my pocket square and ascot? Oh Muffy, have you seen my velvet smoking jacket?

— Christopher Schwarz

My favorite part of a project isn’t the joinery – it’s the assembly. Today I got to attach the lid to the base of my traveling tool chest using hinges made by blacksmith Peter Ross.

These are, in a word, bada%&.

Unlike simple butt hinges, these hybrid butt-straps (as I like to call them) are designed to resist the typical stresses on a chest lid. The weakness of using a butt hinge in a tool chest is that the screws in the carcase tend to wrench out – especially when the lid has an integral stop system to keep the lid standing open.

These hinges from Peter resist those forces. And they look awesome. Peter is now working on the crab lock for this chest. So stay tuned on that front.

I also attached the cast iron lifts to the ends of the chest today. These vintage lifts were given to me by a reader, who acquired them in a box of stuff. The funny thing about adding all this metal hardware is that it seems like it should make the chest more difficult to lug around. But the opposite is true. The lifts and hinges make the chest a svelte thing to move around by myself – just like my vintage traveling chest.

My plan is to sneak down and install the steel banding this week, though I probably will be thwarted by you, the loyal reader. We have almost 1,000 orders to fill for “Mouldings in Practice” starting tomorrow morning. So my woodworking will be taking a backseat to my taping and cardboard-folding skills.

Lots of people have inquired about how I’m going to install the steel banding. Here’s the straight dope: I’m going to butt joint it and screw it to the chest.

Why not weld the corners? I haven’t seen any extant chests with welded corners.

Why not dovetail the steel corners? I’ve done steel dovetails when building infill planes. I know it’s easy. But I haven’t seen any extant chests with dovetailed steel corners.

Why not join the steel corners with my heat vision? Sadly, I have no superpowers.

Oh, speaking of the fact that I lack superpowers: I screwed up this tool chest during the glue-up. I’m telling you this because my students take a crazy amount of gleeful delight whenever I make a mistake. When I glued up the carcase it ended up out of square by 1/16” over the 18” depth. That’s not enough error to see with the naked eye, but it is enough to mess with the construction of my two sliding tills.

So I’m going to make my tills as parallelograms in plan view. Fun on a bun.

— Christopher Schwarz