The hardest part of building a traditional tool chest is to fit the 6”-wide lower skirt all the way around the dovetailed carcase. No matter how careful you are, it’s easy to end up with a gap between the skirt and case.
I have concocted at least five different ways to fight this gap.
1. Fill it with water putty.
2. Plow a groove around the dovetailed carcase where the top of the skirt goes. Glue a thin strip of wood to the inside of the skirt pieces at the top of the moulding that fits in the groove.
3. After assembling the carcase, run the whole thing through a wide-belt sander to true up the carcase.
4. Make the beveled section of the moulding a separate piece that you miter and nail on top of the dovetailed part of the skirt.
5. Add a 3/16” bead moulding that is stuck onto a 1/4” x 1/4” strip of wood – miter it at the corners.
This fifth solution is my favorite. Today I added this bead detail to a full-size tool chest I’m building for a customer. I had a small gap – a little less than 1/16” at one corner – between the lower skirt and the carcase. While the skirt looked tight in the dry-fit, something went wrong.
To fix it, stick the 3/16” bead onto the four long edges of a 1-1/2” x 1-1/2” x 48”-long piece of pine. Then rip the four corners off to make four pieces of 1/4” x 1/4” x 48” moulding. Miter, glue and nail it to the lower skirt.
The whole process took about 30 minutes. It adds a shadow line to the lower skirt and spares the water putty.
Sometime in the late 1990s I had three full sets of chisels – Marples Blue Chips, Ashley Iles and some fine blue-steel Japanese chisels. But instead of enjoying the fact that I had more chisels than my father, grandfather or uncle, I was grumpy.
I was pissed (with myself) that I had three sets of chisels to maintain. Three sets to store. Three sets that would set me back in my efforts to master one set of chisels. All this was made worse by the fact that we had a water-cooled grinder in the shop. So every time I had a chip in a Blue Chip, I had to cool my jets for a half hour with the water-cooled hummer.
But it wasn’t just chisels.
No one needs five smoothing planes, two jointer planes, three jack planes and six shoulder planes to build ordinary furniture. That’s not a working set of tools, that’s a never-ending obligation to sharpen, tune and learn an overly large set of tools.
As one of my female friends put it: “Why are men always fantasizing about sleeping with two or three women? They can barely handle one.”
The same is true with tools. For the last several years I’ve been selling or giving away all of the excess tools that accumulated on my shelves as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine. I had bought those tools with my own money, and so I felt responsible for them. They had to be protected from rust and dust. They had to be lubricated occasionally. They had to be used, or I would feel guilt.
At first it was easy to sell the tools that I didn’t want to review in the magazine in the first place. Then came the tools I used on occasion. Then the tools that were made by people I really liked. And the tools that I was inexplicably attached to. Every time I thought I had gotten to the bare bones set of tools, I found I was wrong. I could get rid of more.
What proved me wrong? My tool chest.
When I defined my working set of tools as only the tools in my chest, I found myself becoming less of a zookeeper and more of a woodworker. I now know exactly how much backlash is in every metallic plane I own. When I pick up each of my planes, I can tell if someone else has been using them – I don’t know how. Because I have one jointer, one jack and two smoothing planes, I spend less time sharpening and cleaning and lubricating, and I spend more time building.
Some of this drivel above might sound like a rehash of themes from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – and perhaps it is. But I can tell you that after two years of working with a small set of tools, these ideas have become even more entrenched in my day-to-day life.
And here’s the important part: As I have become more skilled with the basic set of tools, I see no need (for me) to buy specialty tools.
It’s the specialty tools that can get you. The Stanley 98/99 planes sure look handy to widen dados. But instead I just make the mating shelf thinner with my jack. A bullnose plane looks good for cleaning up stopped rabbets, but chisels are just as fast. Dado planes look like a quick way to knock a carcase together. A sash saw and chisel, however, are almost as fast and are already sharp and set up.
I could go on like this for pages and pages when it comes to specialty tools.
I’m not saying that specialty tools shouldn’t exist – if you do repair work most of the day, you probably are going to need a chisel plane. But if your work isn’t specialized (note that I didn’t say “special”), I think that specialty tools should be way low on your list of things to acquire, down next to “gut punch” and “recreational colonoscopy.”
Caveat: OK, if you like to collect tools and that makes you happy, then by all means collect tools. Collect thousands of them. Take care of them, preserve them for future generations and learn all you can about them. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you need all of them if you really just want to build chests, cabinets, tables and chairs.
If construction (not collecting) is your goal, find some way to limit yourself – a tool chest is one way – so you can be a better builder than you are a consumer.
I have worn out, torn out and discarded more shop aprons than I can count. Most aprons are made poorly from crap materials. Many are too heavy and hot, or they are too flimsy and like a peek-a-boo shop teddy.
But I have high hopes for my new shop apron. Made by Chris Hughes of Artifact Bag Co, my latest shop apron is made from 14 oz. waxed cotton and is riveted and tacked in all the right places (all these Roorkhee chairs this year have given me a new appreciation for the sewing arts).
My wife, Lucy, bought this apron for me in December. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’d just about worn out my shop apron from Duluth Trading, and I was already weary of its knee length. I’m a modest guy, but the Duluth apron was positively Victorian – all it needed was a hoop skirt and bustle to complete the effect.
The Artifact apron is like a second skin, and it ends right below the crotch. It slips easily over your head and the ties remain restrained by the grommets until you pull them out behind your back. The pockets are snug, which means they won’t fill with shavings and other debris while you work.
My apron is the one in rust canvas with white tape. There are other colors and models available to suit your style or your budget. My apron cost $98, which seems expensive until you try to make any high-quality cloth or leather goods yourself (thank you Roorkhee chairs for that lesson).
Looking around at contemporary furniture, one is more and more conscious of how little there is of really pleasant, comfortable attractive design for the ordinary men and women who want just that in their home and can feel no enthusiasm for freakishness or oddity or the bleakness of peg-legs and the like in the furniture they have to live with.
And how utterly bleak those peg-legs will look when the novelty and newness have worn off and only the barren, unimaginative ugliness remains.
Woodcraft Supply LLC caught a rash of criticism in recent years for introducing tools that were Chinese-made copies of current American-made tools. First Woodcraft started carrying hammers that were obvious copies of the Glen-Drake hammers. Then the company introduced its line of WoodRiver handplanes that were – in my opinion – merely imported copies of Lie-Nielsen planes.
This copying lead to some hand-tool makers severing their ties with Woodcraft – most notably Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. And there have been some hard feelings and behind-the-scenes grumbling about Woodcraft, which for years carried the hand-tool banner when few other companies would.
Now I don’t have inside information on Woodcraft. I’m just a hand-tool customer and observer – I’m no longer a woodworking journalist. But recently I’ve noticed that Woodcraft has been coming out with hand tool products that aren’t just copies of other tools that are in production by competitors. It’s refreshing to see this. So I want to encourage the behavior and tip my hat to them.
Earlier this year I saw two new spokeshaves from Woodcraft under the Pinnacle name that showed real spirit. The shaves are based on the venerable Stanley 151 platform, but the company has made them out of stainless. That’s a new thing. And they look like they are based on original patterns – not just cast copies of someone else’s tool.
I have yet to try the shaves (I have two spokeshaves already), but I definitely will test drive them next time I’m in my local Woodcraft.
Also notable: Woodcraft has recently released its new No. 92 shoulder plane under the WoodRiver name. While this shoulder plane shares DNA with the fantastic and extinct Preston shoulder plane line, Woodcraft made the tool its own by improving the design a bit by adding an adjustable toe. The company also added some stylistic details marking it as its own.
It’s a 3/4”-wide plane, which wouldn’t be my first choice for a shoulder plane, but it still looks pretty good and is definitely not a copy.
Perhaps this is a trend or the work of Jody Garrett, who was named the new president of the company in May 2012. Or perhaps I’m just grasping at straws. In either case, I hope Woodcraft continues on this course by adding diversity to the hand-tool market instead of just copying the successful designs of others.
