Gigantic Toolchest
As my woodworking has developed so has my collection of tools. Recently it had gotten to the point where I had run out of room in the conventional spaces for storing such things, and had to resort instead to shoving tools and bits of wood into various nooks and crannies around the house. This was not scalable.
Around that same time, starting in late January, I enrolled myself in a 35-hour woodworking course here in the city. The course was spread over the course of 11 weeks, 3 hours a week, and was done all in italian, which was really the more challenging part. It was 100% a worthwhile experience; there's only so much you can learn from the internet, which is often full of contradicting or exagerrated information, and so it's really nice to have a professional sit down and explain what's what.
The last five weeks of the course were set aside for each of us students to build a project. The actual parameters of what these projects had to be was pretty open-ended; as long as we could finish it in the 5 weeks, it was fair game.
I decided to build a giant toolchest.
The first step was design, which honestly wasn't too difficult. I knew I wanted something large, because it would ultimately be easier to have a big storage container for all tools than a bunch of small ones, and even if I didn't need all the space now it would give me a bit of room to grow into. And by being large it could also double as a sitting area in our loft.
SketchUp design I worked off of. Drawing actual dimensions in SketchUp was broken, incredibly, so I resorted to printing this out and including them manually.
The toolchest is divided into two halves: the top half is a simple big open-top chest, and the bottom half is further sub-divided into four smaller drawers. The open-top half is intended for larger tools and scrap wood, with the option in the future of further sub-dividing it as necessary. Mostly I wanted flexibility, since I don't know now what I'll want later. The drawers are for smaller tools and hardware that need more fine-grained organization and protection.
Lots of clamps.
So, so many clamps.
The outer chest is held together using dowels (pins?) and glue, while the inner drawers are nails and glue. I could have done dowels in the drawers as well, but it was decided there wasn't time. I'll fix it when it breaks. The whole project is made our of 2cm poplar, which is light but a little sturdier than pine, and looks much nicer.
The drawers fitting properly on the first try was a magical experience.
Still missing the front faces of the drawers, those were added last to make sure they fit perfectly, taking into account any errors when mounting the rails.
Most of my time on this project was spent sanding. I don't know if I like sanding, perhaps I'm still learning to like it, but I'm definitely strongly considering getting a small electric sander.
All sanded and assembled.
These pictures were taken in the classroom, I had to dissassemble everything again to get it home.
Look, it opens!
The "final" step in any woodworking projects is the finish. I say "final" in quotes because really it takes about the same amount of time as making the whole damn thing in the first place, just that there's more waiting. I put three coats of linseed oil on the chest, with sanding and a few days waiting between each. The drawers ended up being the hardest part; the inside corners are difficult to get sanded correctly. I also didn't bother properly sanding all of it, only the parts which would be visible, and this affected the final finish so that if you _do_ interact with those hidden parts (like the underside of the drawers) you can tell it's a bit rough. But overall it's buttery smooth and looks great now.
Finished, sanded, in situ.
Showing them what I got.
As you can see the chest also doubles as a little bench/table in our guest area, so we keep the multi-use theme going from previous workshop posts.
What's next? I have no idea! Maybe a little laundry hamper organizer... but also I need to refinish the upstairs couch, which will surely take all summer, so it might be a while before another post to this section. In the meantime, I know where all my tools are!
This site is a mirror of my gemini capsule. The equivalent gemini page can be found here, and you can learn more about gemini at my 🚀 What is Gemini? page.