Sunday, April 5, 2015

Dutch tool chest, details

Yesterday I promised some details and photos of the chest.  Let's start with the outside.

The paint was dry enough this morning for me to re-assemble and repack the chest.

It's now very blue...



You can also see how cramped my workspace is... I'm squeezed in next to the clothes dryer.




Top open.  You can see the rack for small joinery saws at the top, the tool rack, and the top of a couple of large saws.    Below is a closeup of the joinery saws:  I'm working on rehabbing a nice old dovetail saw, but I haven't finished re-cutting the teeth yet, so this little gent's saw does the job for now.




The inside of the top section.  The rack holds screwdrivers, chisels, odd bits for a brace, and a Yankee screwdriver.  Bench planes and large saws are also stored up here, along with a box holding a full set of auger bits.  I somehow forgot to put the tenon saw back in before shooting.  Oops.  The tool rack and saw till I'll probably replace at some point... they work OK for now, but they're not ideal.



Fully open, with the bottom pretty empty.  There are two more shelves that go on the right, which you'll see next.


Almost entirely packed.  A few more things got added to the top along the way, but this is pretty much what it looks like in daily use.  I'm considering a shallow drawer (maybe two inches deep) for the top of the open section.  The shelves are really over-filled, and it would be nice to have a safer place for things like scrapers and blades for the combination plane.


Finally, the front panel.  The 16" square and coping saw fit pretty perfectly, and the slats to hold the panel in place slide behind the square just about perfectly.


All in all, I'm happy with the way this came out.  Even freshly painted it looks a little battered, but I don't mind that:  it was made from recycled lumber (previously a nearly unusable workbench), and I enjoy that it shows some history.

I doubt I've finished my changes to it:  I'm pretty sure I'm going to build a drawer for the lower section, and I may well rebuild the tool rack and saw till as well... I'll have to use them a little longer, and see what other tools I acquire.  At this point I think I mostly just need things like moulding planes, so there shouldn't be much change necessary in the top section.

In any case, there it is:  my completed-for-the-moment tool chest.




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