Tool Chest Till Ends

[Andy Kev.]

I've been making a tool chest in accordance with the plan in the book The Anarchist's Tool Chest by Christopher Schwarz. When it comes to the tills he recommends that they be fitted with oak bottoms as oak is hard wearing. The rest of the tills should made of pine.

As it happens the few bits of oak I have have already been cut to rough length with a view to making a bedding box out of them and so I didn't have suitable pieces for the till bottoms. However, it occurred to me that a couple of small offcuts could be put to use. This is because the tills ride only on thin strips on the two side walls of the chest. Therefore most of the oak of a complete bottom is irrelevant in terms of it being hard wearing. So I cut a rebate on the offcuts and matched it to the till ends:

Then it was a matter of nailing, gluing and sinking the nail heads:

And here's the one I made earlier. The two bits of the pine bottom simply had the ends rebated to fit under the oak ends.

A side effect of this construction method is that it helps keep weight down as relatively little dense oak is used.

 

[AndyT]

Looks good, I hope we get to see the rest.
I also recognise those Rivierre nails!

 

[Andy Kev.]

You may well get to see the rest. The build of this thing has been running for more than two years now and the last job is the tills. So far I've got one and a half of the three done and the final step will be fitting little knobs to them to make them easy to move.

Like a lot of traditional things which have evolved their form, it is a brilliant design. However, I suspect that the modern ones, when loaded up, weigh a lot more than the originals because of the use of metal bodied planes these days. I've got mine on rubber-wheeled castors and so far it's only got the planes and measuring tools in it but it doesn't half weigh a fair bit. Without the castors it would be more or less immobile when fully laden.

 

[thetyreman]

nice, I'd like to see the final chest once its complete, I'm literally just starting mine and hope to do the entire thing within a month, we'll see how that goes once I get started.