Editor’s note: As promised, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are writing a series of blog entries that explain how we have improved the construction process for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” during the last nine years (and several hundred chests).
When I built my first tool chests, I dovetailed the carcase and then immediately nailed on the bottom boards. My goal was to use the bottom boards to pull the case square (if it needed it) and then hold it square as I attached the skirts around the outside.
The downside to this approach is that the bottom gets in the way of clamping the lower skirt to the carcase. Once we changed the order of operations, it became much easier to get the lower skirt attached to the carcase with few (if any gaps). Here’s what we do now:
Dovetail the carcase, level the joints and plane off any machine marks.
Assemble the carcase, and work like heck to get the case square at both its top and bottom. You need to check for square at both openings.
Dovetail the skirts, as per the book’s instructions.
Nail temporary 3/4”-thick blocks to the bottom rim of the carcase. These represent the future location of the bottom boards.
Glue the lower skirt in place, making sure it is flush with the temporary blocks mentioned above.
When the glue has dried, remove the blocks and put in the bottom boards.
The original 45° skirt.
The new 30° skirt.
We’ve also changed the bevel we cut on the skirts. In the original book I planed a 45° bevel on all the skirts. That’s fine, but a steep bevel looks much nicer. Now we use an approximately 30° bevel and leave a flat at the top of the bevel that’s about 3/16”. That flat area allows us to miter a 3/16” bead moulding around the skirt (if the customer wants it).
Carsiding. This stick is, I think, from Menard’s.
Bottom Boards
For many years, we made our own bottom boards for the chests and used shiplap joints or (my preference) tongue-and-groove joints on their long edges. Now we purchase ready-made tongue-and-groove pine boards from the home center. It’s cheaper and saves time.
The material is sometimes sold as pine “carsiding” in 1×6 or 1×8 sizes. You can find it in different grades. I suspect they are No. 1 and No. 2 grades, but they aren’t always marked that way in the store. You’ll know when you find No. 2. It looks like No. 2 (yes, that’s a scatalogical joke).
The new arrangement of the bottom boards, skirt (one has been removed for clarity) and the rot strips. The rot strips are now proud of the skirt.
Rot Strips
On the original chest, the rot strips were installed flush to the bottom edge of the lower skirt. Now we make the bottom boards flush to the bottom edge of the lower skirts. And the rot strips are proud of the skirts. This new arrangement prevents the skirts from getting wet and rotting. And the rot strips are now easier to replace when they get funky.
Finally, we now plane a 45° bevel on the long edges of the rot strips to make it easier to slide the finished chest across the shop floor.
Editor’s note: September 1, 1939, two days before the declaration of war, Britain imposed mandatory nightly black-outs to prevent enemy aircraft from identifying targets. The black-outs resulted in many people spending long, quiet hours at home once darkness fell.
Years ago I knew an old schoolmaster who, after his retirement, had made a hobby of landscape painting. All through the summer months, and on any mild winter’s day, you would meet him stepping out briskly with his folding easel, sketching stool, paints and canvas—a lean, dapper, grey-bearded man, with weather-beaten face and twinkling eyes. A man who enjoyed talking to any man, woman, or child he met, who had his own cheery philosophy of life and sent every one away smiling from the encounter. A man who in the evening of his days was leading a contentedly full, happy life.
***
Even then I did not realise, till after his death, all that he had gained from it. It happened that I was invited to his house to choose one of his pictures as a souvenir. I was one of the merest of acquaintances, just one of the many who used to enjoy a gossip with him by the way, and I had never entered his house during his lifetime. I remember gazing about me in astonishment at the overwhelming evidence of his industry. Not only were the walls of every room completely covered with pictures, but there were stacks of them in a lumber room as well. And, looking at them, one realised that not one moment spent upon them had been wasted. They were not great art. They would never make him famous. Probably by this time, except in the houses of those who loved him, they have become real lumber and have long ago been destroyed. But in them he had captured the sunlight shining on the buttercup fields, lighting up old red roofs, glinting on the surface of a running stream and on the grey-green of overhanging willows. He had caught the sky in all its moods, dappled with drifting cumuli clouds or dark with storm. And he had looked at it all with the eyes of understanding and painted the best he knew. Gazing at those pictures, you felt how he had enjoyed painting them. They had taken him into another world, shown him the beauty that lies hidden in simple, everyday things. No wonder he was a very happy man.
***
All this comes back to me now in reflecting how much more in the months—perhaps even in the years—to come, we are going to be thrown back upon our own resources for the filling of our leisure time. There will not be the same facilities for pursuing our pleasures away from home, still less an inducement to do so during the long black-out evenings. But if we can really concentrate upon some hobby or occupation that will keep hands and minds employed we shall not lose by the change. The man already having a fair proficiency in woodwork who sets himself to become a skilled craftsman, the novice who determines to remain a novice no longer, by so doing enter into a new world, one in which they are discovering the possibilities of their own powers, establishing new standards of self-reliance. And one never knows where discoveries of this kind will end. …
***
… So that we have to set to work to make our plans for the black-out evenings—plans that will not allow us time for brooding over-much over what the future may bring, because that is futile and weakening. “Don’t cross your bridges before you come to them” is excellent advice. Our imagination is so apt to run riot, to show the bridges breaking down under our feet, without revealing the other side of the picture—that there is always some way of getting across. Let us therefore keep these troubled minds of ours fully occupied over a good practical job and worries and anxieties will assume reasonable proportions: In times like these we cannot hope—or even wish—to escape them altogether. To do so would be to stand altogether aloof from the common danger and the common purpose. But we can learn to cope with them like men.
The bad news: At midnight on March 11, you will no longer receive a free pdf of the book when you order a copy of the printed version. Before that deadline, you can get the printed book and the pdf for $49. On March 12, the printed book and the pdf will be $61.50.
I have yet to see the printed book, but it is scheduled to arrive at our Kentucky storefront sometime tomorrow. It should be a fun scene. I’m teaching a class this week on building an American Welsh stick chair, so we have some chairmakers who are eager to see the book. (I know I am.)
When will yours arrive? Soon, I hope. Our warehouse is generally speedy when filling pre-publication orders. You should receive an email about your copy in the coming week or so. As always, if you think something is amiss with your order, don’t leave a comment on the blog. Instead, send an email to help@lostartpress.com and we’ll be happy to assist you.
As we near the home stretch on our forthcoming book about kitchens, we thought it would be fun to publish a series of posts about a kitchen remodel on which I’m now working. The first post sets the scene. Upcoming posts will discuss layout and aesthetic dimensions, the limited changes we’ll make to the space, sources of hardware and other products, etc. I plan to begin building the cabinets later this month. The bulk of the construction on the jobsite should take place in June.
Jenny and Ben in the kitchen, an ideal “before” picture. The tile floor, while easy to clean, feels cold and is hard on bodies; it also creates a sharp visual distinction between the kitchen and living room. The base cabinet faces are seriously worn, with some doors and drawer fronts falling apart. A trash compactor installed by a previous homeowner no longer works and takes up valuable space. The dishwasher and microwave with integral hood no longer function, either. The bulkheads, which were common in mid-century construction, take up space without offering any function.
Jenny and Ben live with their three children and two cats in a split-level ranch built in 1959. Over their 15 years in the house they’ve made a few major improvements as finances allowed – repairing the carport, building a deck, remodeling a basement bedroom and liberating the living room’s original oak floor from a cloying layer of wall-to-wall carpet. But they’ve stayed away from the kitchen. “We knew we didn’t want to improve it piecemeal, but all at once,” Jenny says. “For instance, we didn’t want to just replace the oven in its spot in the cabinets, because I wanted a full-sized oven.”
At approximately 11’ by 15’, the kitchen, which is also the dining room, is relatively compact for a family of five, especially when you consider it’s the hub of the home. The kids have breakfast before leaving for school and each take a homemade lunch. (One of the first things Jenny mentioned she’d like for the remodeled kitchen is a tidy place to store lunch boxes and water bottles.) The dining table is a favorite place for coffee, drawing and doing homework, all before the room gets a major workout in preparation for dinner every night. Then there are dishes to wash and put away.
The kitchen is also the house’s dining room and a central place for conversations. Shelves on the room’s two outside walls hold things that are handy to keep in the kitchen but make the room feel cluttered and cramped.
We first met about a year ago to discuss this project. I appreciated their approach; they weren’t motivated by a desire to update the space according to contemporary fashion, but hoped for a more functional kitchen that would feel like a place they wanted to be – warmer and with more natural light. The room has enviable southern exposure, but they wanted to add a skylight or two, along with better light fixtures.
They also appreciated, and wanted to honor, their home’s history and architectural aesthetic. The house had been built by local businessman “Bud” Faris several years after he took over his family’s grocery store on the downtown square; with his wife, Barbara, he’d raised five children in the modest, practical house about 2-1/2 miles southeast of downtown. A veteran of World War II, Bud was active in local politics and community affairs. He was also reputed to be a neighbor’s neighbor. Ben and Jenny recall that their real estate agent told them she’d lived blocks away in her childhood; at the end of the week, Mr. Faris would bring home the meat that hadn’t sold and grill it for the kids in the neighborhood.
The kitchen had been remodeled, probably in the 1990s, with a bright tiled floor and new cabinets and appliances. But by the time of my first visit the cabinets were falling apart. A good chunk of base cabinetry in the room’s hardest-working corner was (and still is) taken up by a long-broken trash compactor. Of the other major appliances, only the refrigerator is in reasonable working order.
The cabinetry housing the wall oven has so much unused cubic footage that my mouth waters with anticipation at the coming transformation.
A variety of shallow shelves and freestanding tables and cabinets line the two exterior walls – great places for growing houseplants and storing art supplies, but they make the dining table feel cramped and give the room a cluttered look. Spanning the space between the front door and the kitchen is a shallow cabinet built into an alcove framed up by the builders – a nice touch in 1959, but by today’s standards it wastes a lot of valuable space.
One other change Ben and Jenny want to make is to open up the wall between the living room and kitchen. Not only will this bring more light into the kitchen (the living room, too, enjoys great southern exposure); it should also make it easier to keep guests from feeling trapped in the kitchen by allowing them to interact with the cooks from the adjacent room. Complicating this hoped-for improvement is that the stairway to the basement is located directly behind the kitchen sink area, looming a bit like a chasm as you enter the kitchen from the front door.
Jenny and Ben seriously considered enlarging the kitchen/dining room by enclosing the carport and turning it into finished interior space. After a few months of preliminary planning with an architect, they concluded they would stick with the existing footprint — a decision I confess delighted me, as it made redesigning the space to function well, appear spacious, and feel more peaceful exactly the kind of challenge I love.
Coming next: Planning, layout, and homing in on aesthetic dimensions.
— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and a soon-to-be-titled book on kitchen design.
A Bit More About Bud Faris
Bud Faris was descended from the first members of Bloomington’s Faris family, who traveled by covered wagon from South Carolina to Monroe County, Indiana, in 1826, eight years after the county was established. Here they joined fellow members of the Covenanter religious movement who had moved north after unsuccessfully trying to persuade southern legislators to abolish slavery.
Like most of the county’s early settlers of European descent, the Faris family lived initially in a log cabin. They later owned two farms, one north of downtown, the other south, where they raised livestock and cultivated wheat and alfalfa. They sold their produce and meat at the Faris Brothers Meat Market, which opened in 1923 and became a longstanding fixture on the east side of Bloomington’s courthouse square.
Charles “Bud” Faris took over the market in the 1950s, changing its name to Faris Market. He operated the grocery until he died in 2002. [Author’s note: I moved to the Bloomington area in 1988 and can vividly recall the old-fashioned grocery, its tall walls lined with shelves of household staples, the whole place redolent of freshly butchered meat.] The market closed in 2006.
Bud Faris was well known and active in city politics. He served as a member of city council and helped launch the local United Fund, now known as United Way. He was named Bloomington’s “Outstanding Man of the Year” in 1952 and inducted posthumously into the Monroe County Hall of Fame in 2007 for his contributions to the county.
The information here is based on “Faris family has long history in Monroe County” by Ernest Rollins, published in The Herald-Times Jan. 31, 2018.
Editor’s note: As promised, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are writing a series of blog entries that explain how we have improved the construction process for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” during the last nine years (and several hundred chests).
First, let’s get this out of the way: When I wrote “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” I didn’t think many people would build the damn thing. The chest was intended more as an idea. I love using floor chests, but I thought they would be a hard sell with readers. I was wrong.
When I started teaching classes on building the chest – the first class was in Germany before the book even came out – I struggled to get the students with a finished chest and lid after five days (never mind the interior tills and trays).
That forced me (and later Megan Fitzpatrick, who now teaches the tool chest classes) to rethink the process and see if we could make a chest in five days without using the “punishment whip” on the students. The first change I made (which saved a whole day of work) was to change the dovetails.
In the book, I used 13 dovetails at each corner – that’s 52 dovetails for the basic shell. And it is overkill. Nowadays we use seven dovetails at each corner. The chest is – in my opinion – just as strong. And most students assemble the shell by the end of the second day.
The second change was to eliminate the shallow rabbet I cut on the ends of the tail boards. The shallow rabbet assists in transferring the tail shape to the pinboards. In the book I show how to cut the rabbet on a table saw and with a rabbet plane.
When I started teaching this method, I found that most students had never used a rabbet plane. And so all their rabbets sloped down. Horribly. Chaos and gappy joints ensued.
Now I have the students temporarily tack a yardstick to the baseline of the tailboard (I call this the “Other Ruler Trick”). This helps everyone make the transfer with ease. No sloping rabbets. And no one locks themselves in the bathroom sobbing (not even me!).
The good news: “
