Tool Cabinet

After a full day at Woodcraft I got home and decided to get something done. Typically, I get home after working and pass out for a few hours. Today was a bit different. The past few days I have been drinking vegetable juice from my Champion juicer.

Tonight’s Recipe:

1/2 bunch of Lacinato Kale

big handful of Italian flat-leaf parsley

2 big carrots

3 stalks of celery

1/2 of a cucumber

1 lemon

2 inch section of ginger

2 granny smith apples

After slamming about 40 ozs. of Green Gold I noticed a great burst in my typical Saturday evening production. I swept up the shop, emptied my dust collector, stacked all of the cut lumber for my next furniture making class, sorted through all of my hardwood and pulled out enough cherry and soft maple to begin building my tool cabinet…Wait there’s more.

Several months ago I was playing around with a CAD design for a wall mounted tool cabinet. I wanted something large enough to accommodate two dozen bench planes, all of my block planes, specialty planes, chisels, saws, mallets, measuring and layout tools as well as my odd ball joinery tools.  I came up with a cabinet which will be door-less for the time being and likely have a few doors in the near future.

The rough dimensions of the cabinet are 48″ wide, 42″ tall and 12″ deep. It will have 7  drawers and be made from maple cherry and sassafras. Here is an incomplete and somewhat incorrect CAD drawing of the cabinet.

I have amassed a nice selection of air dried hardwoods. A few of the boards which I have not had any definitive plans for are now being put to good use. I selected a rather average looking piece of 5/4 soft maple. And some very nice barn cured cherry with many years of patina. The cherry boards were so dark they were thought to be walnut at the time of purchase.

After cutting the stock to length I began the process of flattening one side of the boards (Side A) with my #5 and #7 1/2 planes. Once the twist (wind) and bow are eliminated, off they go to the surface planer. While I certainly enjoy the connection with my hand planes. I can get far more done by taking advantage of my 15″ surface planer and reference the hand flattened side A on the bed of the planer to yield a flat board of perfectly even thickness. I can use my power jointer to flatten boards up to about 10″ but hand planes let me work boards of any size. Once side B has been planed, I flip the board over and place side B on the bed of the planer and clean up the Hand flattened side A with a pass or two. In about an hour I was able to get all of my stock ready for the next phase of this project…Dovetails. I am going to cut them all by hand. Something that a machine can certainly do, but the look of hand cut joints cannot be replicated no matter which fixture you have.

How about the color of this cherry. You don’t come across cherry this dark too often any more. Good thing it’s going to be used in my hand tool cabinet.  The maple is pretty stunning as well. It is kind of hard to see in the photo but what looked to be an average board turned out to be tiger stripped and looks great.  I may have to use a bit of dye to pop the figure in the maple.  Discovering the look and hidden surprise in each rough board is part of the enjoyment I get from woodworking… One of the great plus’s to using rough lumber.

As I finish up typing this post, Moose is dreaming about something. He makes more noise in his sleep than he does awake.

-Sam

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