Making the bottom boards of a tool chest is straightforward work. For years I made tongue-and-groove boards using rough pine and beaded the tongue side.
Then, I visited Menards.
This home center giant carries 1 x 8 x 8’ pine carsiding in Eastern white pine. It is already tongue-and-grooved and finished beautifully. I couldn’t find any machine marks when I handplaned it. And the price in incredible. In the store a 1 x 8 x 8’ is about $5.50. That’s cheaper than I can buy rough white pine.
So all you have to do is crosscut it, plane it and nail it in place.
This takes us to another change I’ve adopted since publication of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011. I use Rivierre nails to fasten the bottom boards instead of cut nails. These nails hold as well as blacksmith-made Roman-style nails.
The most stressful part of building a tool chest is gluing the lower skirt to the carcase. The fit has to be perfect. If it’s not, the skirt won’t go on at all (this happened to a student once). Or it will be a little loose and you’ll have an ugly gap between the skirt and the carcase.
The first hurdle is to get the four skirt pieces to the perfect length. Here’s how I do this: Dovetail one corner of the skirt, assemble it dry and clamp it in place to the tool chest. Make sure the skirt is dead flush with the bottom edge of the carcase.
Then use a block plane blade to scribe the baselines on the skirt pieces.
Then use a scrap that is the same thickness as your skirt material to pencil in the final lengths of the skirting pieces. Crosscut them and shoot them to final length.
Repeat the process with the other two skirting pieces. Cut the profile on the top edge of the skirting boards (I used a 30° bevel) and plane off the machine marks on the outside of the skirt boards.
The skirts extend 3/4” below the bottom edge of the carcase, creating a rabbet for the bottom boards.
To create this rabbet, nail four scrap pieces of your bottom material to the bottom edge of the carcase. When you glue the skirting to the carcase, those parts will need to be flush with the bottom of these scrap blocks.
Gluing on the skirt is like docking a ship. Glue the two long skirt boards to one short skirt board. Paint the inside of this U-shaped assembly with glue and slide it onto the carcase. Flush the skirts with the scrap blocks as best you can.
Then glue on the fourth skirting board. Place the assembly on a benchtop and knock the skirt boards down until they are flush against the benchtop. Clamp up the dovetails to squeeze out any gaps in the joints. Walk away.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If, after all this work, you end up with a gap between the skirt and carcase, decline to freak. I’ll show you a trick to hide it beautifully that doesn’t involve paint or putty.
Several weeks ago I received the image above via text message from Megan Fitzpatrick. Just the picture. No accompanying words.
I knew immediately that she was copy-editing the book I’d written about English Arts and Crafts furniture.
“Trust Megan to find one of those,” I thought with a pang of guilt.
Find one of what? you ask. A Stonehenge-themed key fob.
***
A couple of years ago, Megan gave her colleague Scott Francis my name. Scott was the books editor at Popular Woodworking, and he was looking for someone to write a book about English Arts and Crafts furniture. He called me. I was certainly interested; by that time I had done a fair bit of research on one particular English maker of Arts and Crafts pieces, and my enthusiasm for the Arts and Crafts movement went back many years. Writing the book would also give me an opportunity to build some exciting work in the shop.
If I was going to write a book about English Arts and Crafts furniture, I sure as heck was not about to regurgitate what everyone else and his brother or sister have written about the movement, most often from a superficial perspective. We’re all familiar with the typical formulation:
Ruthless exploitation of workers by industry + essential William Morris quote “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” = The Arts and Crafts Movement.
I wanted to go deeper. Fortunately for me, Scott and Megan approved my proposal.
I dug out my 1985 Penguin Classics edition of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings, one particular section of which, the essay on “Moral Elements of Gothic,” had been simmering in my consciousness for approximately 25 years. Lovely stuff: a singeing take-down of Victorian industry and culture, in response to the countless hypocrisies of which Ruskin called for a renewed embrace of hardy medieval values.
And there was a bonus: Ruskin’s English differs so dramatically from that of our time as to constitute a semi-foreign language — one that happens to offer rich potential for humor in its translation into contemporary terms. I didn’t want to write an academic treatise likely to be read by three or four people. I wanted to speak to fellow woodworkers and those with a general interest in material culture, as well as the Arts and Crafts movement. So in writing the book I took every reasonable opportunity to indulge in the kind of humor I hoped would bring the content alive.
***
And now we return to that key fob.
I was on a tear, contrasting the way Brits just get on with life, surrounded by landscapes, art, and architecture formed by their ancestors over thousands of years, while we Americans feel the need to celebrate every minute of our own nation’s drop in the metaphorical bucket.
Drive southwest from London to Somerset and you’ll
glimpse an arrangement of large rocks surrounded by
scattered grazing sheep: Stonehenge. Today a small sign
indicates your entry into a UNESCO world heritage site
shortly before the stones come into view, but 35 years ago,
when I first drove down that road, there was no advance
notice. Unlike monuments of similar significance in the
United States, Stonehenge is not heralded by 20 miles of
billboards urging you to get stoned at the nearby truck
stop (blessedly, there seems to be no such establishment),
have lunch at the Bronze Age Bistro (ditto), or buy druid
fridge magnets and key fobs (these I don’t know about;
they may exist). The landmark is just there, on the horizon
to your right.
It was a throw-away line. A gag. But Megan is that kind of editor: She digs through the trash. Thanks to her curiosity and warped sense of humor, I now know that druid-related key fobs are a thing.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work
English Arts & Crafts Furniture: Projects & Techniques for the Modern Maker is due to be published in May by Popular Woodworking Books.
Contemporary druids celebrating at Stonehenge. Image: wikimedia commons
Today Brendan Gaffney and I got a rare up-close look at one of Chester Cornett’s rockers during a preview for an antiques auction in Cincinnati.
The walnut rocking chair was one of Cornett’s later pieces. And after a close examination, Brendan and I suspect that the rocker was made during Cornett’s brief embrace of power tools.
The biography of Cornett, “Craftsman of the Cumberlands,” discusses a brief period of Cornett’s career when he purchased a table saw, drill press and router (among other machines) to speed his production of chairs as he became more well known.
It did not go well.
Though Cornett was skilled with hand tools, machines made him nervous, and the book recounts several serious injuries Cornett suffered while using them. The book also documents Cornett attempting to use a router to make the incised lines on the posts and rungs of his rockers.
Brendan and I suspect this rocker exhibits these routed details.
The V-shaped incisions were curved, irregular and even had chatter marks upon close inspection. Some of the incisions looked OK. Others looked like Cornett was having a heck of a time using the router freehand on a narrow octagonal post.
These wandering incisions looked nothing like the crisp incisions on other Cornett chairs we’ve inspected.
Part of me thought: Perhaps this is just one of Cornett’s lesser works. But that ignored all the fantastic handwork on the chair, from the shaped arms to the finials. Ah, the finials.
At the top of the posts are two gorgeous pieces of handwork – tapered and octagonal finials that are just perfect in every way. Crisp, evenly faceted and perfectly symmetrical – something no router would be capable of making. But they are doable with a drawknife.
So the piece, while still extraordinary, made me a little sad. The routed details reflected a man who was clearly uncomfortable with his electric tools, yet struggling mightily to control them. The mistakes didn’t ruin the piece, but they did lessen it.
![IMG_2950[1]](https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_29501.jpg)
