This morning we began shooting photos for the new book “Virtuoso: The Toolbox of Henry O. Studley,” and I shot this short video with a narrative by Don Williams, the author of the book.
There’s not anything more for me to add, except that these photos were taken by me with my Canon G12. The photographer, Narayan Nayar, is using his Leica M9 for the book’s photos.
— Christopher Schwarz
Narayan Nayar’s eyes hop briefly off the road ahead and aim right at me.
“Do you think you are an obsessive person?” he asks.
“Um, not really,” I answer. “Do you think I obsess about things?”
“Absolutely,” he replies, returning his eyes to the road.
At first I thought it was an oddball question that came out of the blue during a long car ride. But in hindsight (or perhaps thanks to three beers at dinner), it now makes sense. Because today Don Williams, Narayan and I are on the trail of one of the most obsessed-over woodworking gems of the 19th and 20th centuries: the tool chest of H.O. Studley.
On Tuesday morning we will begin measuring and photographing the famous chest for a book that Don is working on that is tentatively titled: “Virtuoso: The Toolbox of Henry O. Studley.” After years of work, Don has managed to get access to this much-heralded tool chest.
So after Woodworking in America wrapped up on Sunday afternoon, the three of us took off on a car ride to an undisclosed location to visit the chest and and the workbench of this piano and organ maker who worked for the Poole Piano Co. of Boston and died in 1925.
Even in his lifetime, Studley was well known for his tool chest.
“Mr. Studley had for a great many years been in the employ of the Poole Piano Co., and was accounted a rather unusual mechanic,” according to his obituary in The Music Trade Review. “He was the possessor of a set of tools that was the envy of his co-workers, all of them made by himself by hand and some of them beautifully inlaid with pearl and ivory, and which were always proudly exhibited by Mr. Studley to those who showed an interest.”
The chest is quite obviously the result of one man’s amazing obsession with his tools and the chest that holds them. Every tool is perfectly fitted into a compartment – even the small items in the tiny drawers.
And obsessions with the chest have survived for almost 100 years after Studley’s death. Woodworkers have pored over the poster of the chest published by Fine Woodworking. The episode of “The New Yankee Workshop” that features the chest has been analyzed frame by frame. People have built near-replicas or miniatures of the chest. One company – Shepherd Tool – even tried to produce a commercial kit of the chest. Planemaker Wayne Anderson says a photo of the Studley chest is what first inspired him to become a toolmaker.
And now we are set to photograph and measure every square inch of the thing – a rather obsessive chore – for a book that probably will be 18 months to two years in the making.
In fact I shouldn’t even be telling you this – it’s far too early to discuss a project like this. And I can’t tell you much else – such as where we are or who owns the chest. All that I can tell you is that we are staying in a roadside motel (all the chain hotels are full) and we ate a huge meal of … no, that might give something away.
Stay tuned here. We’ll be giving you more details as we obsess over them.
— Christopher Schwarz
Be sure to stop by the Lost Art Press booth at Woodworking in America next week. We won’t have a workbench in our booth (I loaned all mine to the event’s organizers). Nor will we have any booth babes (maybe next year).
But we will have a few surprises.
At the top of that list is that we will have Don Williams, the mastermind behind the massive André Roubo translation project and the author of the forthcoming book on H.O. Studley, the piano maker with the legendary tool chest and almost-as-cool workbench.
Don will be hanging out in our booth answering questions about Roubo and Studley and what he’s learned about both men through his research. And if you are nice to him, he might even show you some photos and etchings….
Don will be around the Northern Kentucky Convention Center for most of the event, but if you want to make sure to talk to him, drop by our booth at 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday and 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.
— Christopher Schwarz
The below was written by our good friend Mattias Hallin, who lives in Belgium (though he would, I think, want me to let you know he is Swedish). You might recall that he is our non-resident expert in linseed oil paint, from this 2024 post (and he wrote for us about overseas ordering, for those few Lost Art Press items not available through our international stockists).
His tool chest – which we’re calling the Archivist’s Tool Chest because that’s his profession – is a study in meticulous planning of storage (and hardware). We asked him to write about it for the blog, and he kindly delivered.
I’ve posted an goodly excerpt below, with a link to download a pdf of Mattias’ entire write-up.
When I was in Covington for a chair class in 2022, Megan kindly lent me a Dutch Tool Chest (DTC) for temporary storage of all the tools I’d brought, and I found that I really liked working out of it. At the same time, I got a good, close-up look at Chris’ and Megan’s full-size Anarchist’s Tool Chests (ATC), and decided there and then to one day build an ATC myself (and a DTC, but that’s a different story) – except, in my case the A stands for Archivist, as that is what I do for a living, while I have nary an anarchic bone in my body.
And now I have built that chest.
This blog post, though, is not about the chest build as such, which, bar some personal tweaks and touches, is pretty much straight out of ‘the literature’ (The Anarchist’s Tool Chest and its addenda here on the blog and in Megan’s videos on the ATC interior and a traveling ATC). Rather, it is about how I approached designing the tool storage, and the ideas and solutions I came up with in that process, as these offer some ideas not suggested in the ATC book.
The Chest: Some Basic Facts
Before diving into my big box, though, just a few words about its general construction.
It is mainly built out of Pinus strobus, i.e. Eastern White or (as it is usually known over here) Weymouth Pine. Runners and till bottoms are oak (Querqus spp, probably robur). The sliding till walls and tool racks are hard maple (Acer saccharum), and finally there’s some boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) for boxing the lid stay slots, while the block plane cubby is pear (Pyrus communis).
Dovetailed carcase and skirts as per TATC. Through-tenoned lid frame, as per same. Bottom boards nailed on, as per, etc. and so forth.
The hardware (except a set of vintage cast iron casters, bought online) is blacksmith made, designed and forged by the fantastic Tom Latané.
The finish is Ottosson linseed oil paints on the outside, and the company’s oil/wax paste on the tills and racks.
The internal space of the empty shell is 36-11/16″ long, 22-1/8″ wide and 23-15/16″ high. Nothing magical about those oddish numbers: they’re simply what aiming for 36-1/2″ x 22-1/4″ x 24″ ended up as.
I barely know my way around SketchUp et al., and while I think I can safely say I’m not bad at figuring stuff out just in my head, for many things I also like to check that thinking by mocking them up. This is particularly true for anything three-dimensional.
Planning for tool storage in my chest began with a considered decision on the dimensions of the basic shell. The larger that shell, the more tool storage potential, so bigger may seem better. That, however, is not the whole story. For starters, a larger chest eats up more space in your shop and becomes more unwieldy to move about. Also, if it is too wide and/or too deep, it becomes hard to reach the bottom or the rear corners. And Chris and Megan warn from experience that the longer the chest, the more likely it is the sliding tills will rack.
So, my initial instinct to throw space at the problem and go large was quickly reined in.
The simplest way forward would have been to just go with the measurements from ATC, but in order not to box myself in too soon, I decided to make the rough panels well over size by some 5″ or so in both length and width. This let me show them to one another and get a much better feel both for how large different sizes of chest would be and how well (or not) I would be able to reach into them.
(Here, by the way, is as good a place as any to say that I mostly don’t work to a cutlist and try to use as few measurements as possible. I do almost all stock prep and dimensioning with hand tools, so usually work to the largest thickness commonly available between a set of parts and make them to fit each other rather than be exactly some pre-defined size.)
Other than overall size and internal reachability, I also knew already at this stage that I wanted:
I did not yet know the exact outer dimensions of the sliding tills, or the thickness of the surface-mounted hinge leaves, nor would I for quite a while, but to get 8-and-a-bit ” internal would likely mean 9″–9-1/2″ external width per till, so 18″–19″ for two tills to open with no overlap.
Add to that at least 2″ for the front rack with room behind for saws, plus a margin for the hinges, and I suspected that the 20-1/8″ internal width in the drawings in ATC would risk being a tad on the tight side.
For final dimensions I therefore decided that all four panels should be 24″ high (same as in the ATC), the front and back 38-1/2″ long (so 1/2″ more than in the book) and the ends 24″ wide (so 2-1/8″ more). Everything else would follow from there.
While things followed, and the basic carcase came together, I had plenty of time to think ahead and consider the basic premises for how I would want to organize the tool storage. On the one hand, I have a strong tendency towards a place for everything, everything in its place and the skates go in the fridge. On the other hand, I had no wish to French-fit the interior. To use an extreme comparison: I am in great awe and admiration of the Studley tool cabinet, but I wouldn’t have it if you paid me to.
In daily practice I will most likely put a tool back in more or less the same spot where I picked it up, but over time where that spot is may well move around.
Basic Premise #1: Tool storage should be flexible.
That said, my tool set is by now quite stable. I have acquired most of the tools I need or see a future need of. I have also sold or given away a number of tools that I either upgraded or didn’t expect ever to use (again). By now, I think what I have left are the keepers.
I will not be able to fit every single keeper into this chest, but then I never expected to. There are, however, keeper tools that I am as certain as makes no difference will live in this chest for the rest of my days. Some of those tools may as well have a permanent place specially fitted to them.
Basic Premise #2: There can be duly motivated exceptions to Premise #1.
Notwithstanding tool set stability, I am no exception to the general rule when it comes to mental shopping lists. That is to say, I have one. Mine may be much shorter than before (cf. stable tool set), but there are tools I know I shall want to get in the coming years. If I know that now, and that I shall want to store them in the chest, I might as well plan for that.
Basic Premise #3: Try to think ahead.
Then again, you never know, so racks and tills should be as easy to replace as is commensurate with safe and solid storage while they’re in use.
Basic Premise #4: Don’t over-fix the fixtures – they may have to come out.
Finally, no matter the solution selected for individual tools, they should come out and go back in easily, blocking each others paths as little as possible. The more frequent the use, the easier the access should be. Edges shall be protected, as shall fingers, hands and arms when rummaging through the depths of the chest. Space should not be wasted, though, but a happy medium sought between efficient storage and effective use.
Basic Premise #5: Aspire to conduct a well-balanced tool ballet.
With these premises clear in my mind, I could start to purposefully mockup dummy versions of the fixed racks and tills and put my ideas and these premises to the test.
The first questions to which I sought answers were, what distance should there be between the front wall and the front tool rack to best store my backsaws, and how high should the rack be above the floor?
My longest backsaw is an 18″ tenon saw. It will live in the saw till on the chest floor, but I still wanted to make sure it could also hang behind the front tool rack if needed. On the other hand, that tool rack should not sit any higher than necessary for that to work. In part because some tool handles are rather long, but mostly to make sure there will be room enough above the rack to fit a crab lock to the inside of the front wall.
It turned out that 5/8″ was the ideal distance between wall and rack, and that with the top of the rack at 16-1/4″ above the floor my biggest backsaw would fit with 1/8″ to spare. I made a careful note of these figures.
I also wanted to know how wide the tool rack should be, what distance from the outer edge holes would be best for tool holes, and what sizes and shapes of holes would best work for different tools, in particular those that would have a permanent place?
Again, dummy racks made from pine offcuts was the perfect method for me. They were easy to run up from an ample supply of material left over from the panel prep, so I could test as many possibilities as I wanted. The “standard” tool hole suggested in the literature is 1/2″ diameter and is drilled with the center point 1/2″ in from the edge. The latter I found held good, but a 1/2″ hole is too small to hold certain tools as well as I wish. Thus, the socket of a Lie-Nielsen chisel seats perfectly in a 14mm (or 9/16″) hole, while a Blue Spruce chisel needs a 5/8″ (or 16mm) hole for the ferrule to go in deep enough that it won’t wobble in the rack. And for my set of Barr Tools cabinetmaker’s chisels, that have larger sockets, the perfect size hole turned out to be 19mm (3/4″).
(While I mostly work in customary/imperial units these days, I drilled some of these tool holes in the closest metric equivalent if that was the best drill bit for the job I had to hand.)
For my pigsticker mortise chisels, I tested elongated holes in different lengths and widths until I found the particular sizes that would best fit each one of them, taking into account the tapered undersides of the bolsters. And for my two paring chisels I went fully bespoke – but I’ll come back to that in the Photo Gallery below.
I also experimented a fair bit to find the ideal distance between centers but won’t go into any detail on that; suffice to say that, depending on the tools involved, it varied between 1-1/2″ and 2-1/4″.
As for the width of the rack, 1-3/8″ turned out to be right, giving a total width of 2″ including the space for saws. While that does not leave much room between the saw handles and the handles of tools stored in the rack, I tested the setup thoroughly and concluded I would be happy with it. I was in any case anxious not to have the front rack extend more than really needed in order to minimize potential interference with the saw till on the floor below.
Speaking of the saw till, it took a fair bit of experimentation to find the right configuration. For starters, how many saws should it hold? I currently have two handsaws – a 26″ rip and a 24″ crosscut – and as already mentioned, I also wanted to store the 18″ tenon saw in this till. That’s three saws. However, on my shopping list are two short – 18″ or 20″ – handsaws, a rip and a crosscut, so I decided on a five-slot till.
With that made clear, there still remained a number of issues to sort out. The till needed to be roomy enough for ease of operation without gobbling up too much floor space. What would that mean in terms of distance between slots? On testing, I found 3/4″ too tight to allow the easy grab of a saw, 1″ fine but unnecessarily roomy, so 15/16″ turned out to be the Goldilocks number.
And would I want to store stuff below the saws? There’s potential space there, but only accessible by removing the saws, which is not very handy. I first thought it would be a good spot for my roll of saw files, which don’t come out all that often, but found that idea overridden by a more important consideration: the placement of the slotted till uprights should be in function of where the backsaw blades will hang.
The front rack has four spacer blocks to create the 5/8″ slot for backsaws, one at either end and two somewhere in the middle, through which the rack is also screwed to the chest wall. The two middle ones I located to optimize the available room to fit my particular set of backsaws, not forgetting to leave room in the middle for the crab lock.
The saw till uprights were then best placed immediately below the two middle spacer blocks to keep them from obstructing the space available for hanging saws. This turned out to mean an off-center placement, with the two uprights too close together for the file tool roll to fit, even on the diagonal. In the end I decided to leave 2-1/2″ underneath the saws: high enough that e.g. a Trusco box will fit in there if needs be, but not conceived to be a major storage space.
There is still about 1-1/2″ clearance between the top of the saw handles and the underside of the bottom sliding till, so in theory I could have gone an inch or so higher. But that would have had an unwanted effect on the interplay between the innermost slot and the tool rack above. For a saw to come out and go in with full clearance from longer tools in the rack, the slot has to be about 2-1/4″ out from the chest wall. Starting a set of five slots from there, though, would have made the whole till go a full 7″ into the central well.
I bought the 18″ tenon saw for my bench build. It did a great job on the massive tenons involved in that but is not in any way a daily user on furniture-size projects. I am not getting rid of it, but it can certainly be stored in a harder-to-reach spot. Thus, I decided to have the innermost slot at but 1-1/4″ from the wall, in effect between the hanging backsaws and the tools in the rack. To get a saw in or out of there, any long tools must first come out of the rack, but for the very occasional use of the 18″ tenon saw, that’s not a problem. The other four slots have good clearance, and the whole saw till, including the bracing rails, ends at 6-1/8″ into the central well, giving me a full 12″ of width for storing bench planes between the till and the molding plane corral.
To read more, download Mattias Hallin’s pdf below.
The Lost Art Press 2023 Holiday Open House is this Saturday (December 2) from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at the storefront: 837 Willard St., Covington, Kentucky, 41011. Sure, we’ll have our full line of books, tools, apparel etc. available, but most exciting is that we’ll have a special guest, educator Jerome Bias, in the shop this week to teach a 6-board chest class, and who is working on a book that explores his family history through woodworking.
We’ll have cookies and holiday drinks (both adult and non-alcoholic offerings), and visitors can take home (free!) an old poster or two – long thought out of stock – from a couple boxes that magically appeared when we moved fulfillment to Covington’s Anthe Building. We’ll also have a shelf full of “blems” (books that are perfectly readable, but got a bit dinged on a corner or what have you), and a small number of beehive bottles of Piggly No Wiggly glue that we’re selling at a reduced price now that we’ve changed to cylindrical bottles. And who knows what else we’ll dig up before Saturday!
Speaking of the Anthe building, we’ll lead two tours thereof (starting from the shop on Willard): the first at 11 a.m.; the second at 2 p.m. The Anthe building is just more than a half-mile away at 407 Madison Ave., so if the weather allows, anyone who wants to can walk over (but there’s parking available if you prefer to drive).
We’ll be doing demos throughout the day – just ask if there’s a tool or technique you want to see/learn – it’s an in-person Open Wire.
Hope to see you on Saturday!
– Fitz
p.s. We won’t be doing an online Open Wire this week; it will return on Dec. 9.
