The chest is built from clear Eastern white pine. The carcase and skirts are completely dovetailed. The bottom boards and battens are attached with cut nails.
The lid is a mortise-and-tenon frame with a dovetailed dust seal around it.
The carcase of the chest is painted in black milk paint (three coats) and ready to go. The lid is glued up and the dust seal needs to be leveled to the lid. Then it can be painted. The dimensions are as per “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – about 24″ x 24″ x 40″. It’s a full-size chest, not a traveling version.
The interior is empty. No tills or dividers.
If you are interested in buying the chest and can pick it up at the school in Manchester, Conn., send an e-mail to Bob Van Dyke at Bob Van Dyke at bobvandyke@sbcglobal.net.
Here you can see the color difference between the old mahogany and the new.
This week I’m finishing up a run of a dozen Benjamin Seaton try squares for friends and customers (sorry, they are all spoken for). Oh, and I’m going to talk about building them on “The Woodwright’s Shop” during a taping on Sunday.
The squares and the material I’m using are quite interesting in my opinion. Also interesting: The stupid mistake I made that led to a little detail about try squares I’d never considered.
The construction details of these squares comes from a must-have book for hand-tool nerds: “The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton 2nd Edition,” which is available at Tools for Working Wood and other retailers.
Seaton built three mahogany squares for his chest, and I’m replicating the small one, which has a 15”-long blade and a stock that is about 11” long.
Despite its simple appearance, this square is more challenging to build than the Roubo try square that I can now almost build in my sleep. Though the French square has more flash with its scrolled ends, the Seaton square has complicated joinery and wide chamfers that are tough to get just right.
The blade of the Seaton square is a two-pronged tenon that passes into the stock. The top tenon goes into an open bridle joint on the top of the stock. The lower tenon goes into a 1/4”-wide through-mortise.
The joint has to be bang-on to work. And when you assemble the square, you have to drive the blade in dead straight. Cock it at any angle and the blade splits.
In fact, all three of Seaton’s squares were split at this point – perhaps due to seasonal wood movement; perhaps to the assembly process.
The first time I built one of these squares in early 2012, I did a dumb thing. The drawings for the square are on the same page of the book as a profile drawing of Seaton’s scriber. At first glance, it looks like the drawing of the scriber is actually a drawing of the blade in plan view.
The reason I was so easily fooled by this gestalt is that the text indicates that the blades of the three squares taper in thickness. So I tapered the blades dramatically – like the taper of the scriber.
I discovered my mistake later, but in the meantime I used the snot out of the square and found that the tapered blade was ideal for hand work. When the square is applied to the edge of a board, the taper tilts the stock slightly so it reads only on the top corner of the board. This is nice if you are dealing with an edge that isn’t perfect or has lumps.
The Mahogany
Last year I bought a truckload of old wood from a retiring woodworker. As we were loading up the last of the stock, the woodworker’s wife implored me to take some old table parts that were cluttering up her garage.
They sure didn’t look like much – some busted tops and extension leaves that were covered in many coats of a black finish. I was hot, tired and ready to go home, so I threw the pieces on top of the pile in the truck and headed out.
Earlier this year, I pulled out some of the table parts to use as secondary wood on a campaign chest. The undersides of the pieces were covered with the tell-tale signs of handwork – no machine marks. Lots of sawblade marks from a large circular mill. All the hardware was let in by hand. Knife marks were everywhere. And the edge detail on the leaves was one that hasn’t been popular for a very long time.
Once I planed the finish off the boards, I was totally enchanted. The mahogany was darker, denser and tighter than any I’ve ever laid my hands on. And these boards were 30”-wide planks – not pieced together.
Even more shocking was what the stuff looks like with a little oil on it. It’s gorgeous and purple and dark – much like Seaton’s squares.
I still have two more planks of this stuff, perhaps enough for a small campaign lap desk.
— Christopher Schwarz
Here you can see the color difference between the old mahogany and the new.
Other bloggers are wary of pulling down their pants. Not me.
I suck at a lot of things, but I really and truly suck at mortising by hand. The problem isn’t really my results – I can get a clean, straight hole. The problem is I’m so dang slow. I have tried every method out there. I practice during lulls in my schedule. I have a good sharp chisel and a strong mallet.
Honest, I have been at this for years and years – since I cut my first mortise by hand in 1993. You can’t help me. Don’t try. I am the mouth-breather of hand-mortising.
This week I’m quite stressed about it. You see, slowness doesn’t hurt anything when you can simply work until 1 a.m. in your own dang shop. But this weekend I’m taping a couple episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” with Roy Underhill, and I’m going to have to mortise for the camera. And we only have 23 minutes and 41.5 seconds for the whole show. That should be enough for me to cut one or two mortises (and it’s not even a show about mortising).
So this week I’ve been trying to speed up my mortising act while building a bunch of try squares that each have a through-mortise and a bridle joint.
So far, I have shaved at least half a second off my time per mortise. (Victory lap!)
If you stink at mortising, check out Jeff Gorman’s excellent site here. He surveys the pros and cons of many methods. In fact, it was from Gorman that I learned the “central-vee” method of mortising, which is my favorite.
Summer twilight brings the mosquito. In fact, when we go far north or far south, we have him with us both day and night. Rather I should say that we have her; for the male mosquito is a gentleman, who sips daintily of nectar and minds his own business, while madame his spouse is a whining, peevish, venomous virago, that goes about seeking whose nerves she may unstring and whose blood she may devour. … Stranger still, the mosquito is not only a bloodsucker but an incorrigible winebibber as well – she will get helplessly fuddled on any sweet wine, such as port, or on sugared spirits, while of gin she is inordinately fond.
— “The Book of Camping and Woodcraft” by Horace Kephart (The Outing Publishing Co.) 1908
While the wood being sold at Midwest Woodworking last weekend was enough to make me salivate, I really got excited when I learned the company was selling off its clamps.
Including, wait for it, a large collection of Wetzler F-style clamps.
I first encountered Wetzlers when Popular Woodworking Magazine gave away a bunch of them as part of a contest. Wetzler shipped the clamps to us; we had to ship them to the winner.
The box of clamps weighed about 300 pounds. After we opened it up, I knew I wanted a set for my shop. The clamps had heavy castings, yet the heads moved smoothly on the bars. And the screws were exquisitely made.
When I finally got my (expletive deleted) together to buy a set of Wetzlers, the company’s web site acted weird. Some links were dead. I tried e-mailing and calling the company. No luck. Eventually, the web site disappeared.
I used my newspaper reporter skills to trace the ownership chain to a Florida holding company. I called and e-mailed them. No response.
Does anyone know what happened to Wetzler? What about the patterns and molds? I know I could find someone who would make these clamps again.
