I've never done a build-along, mostly because I make small things mostly, toys, boxes etc., etc. Plus, I rarely think to stop and take pictures at key points. But I am now building a Gerstner-like carvers chest to hold my most used, tools. Now they are scattered about, a tool roll here, stones and slip there, so this will put everything into one place. The motivation for doing this is I have signed up for a carving class in March. So I can transport my tools in a handy way. Here is the collection of tools it must accommodate, the only thing missing are my sharpening stones and slips.
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The problem with Gerstner chests (I own several) in terms of carving tools are: The chests aren't deep enough to accommodate carving tools, typically 9-10-inches long. The tools could be put in sideways, but that limits how many can be stored and on most Gerstner chests, the drawers are too shallow for much else.
So I decided to make one that is 12-inches deep, about 10 inches tall and 18-inches long. It will be built in a similar way to Gerstner's but with some differences that I will point out as I go along.
This gave me the opportunity to use some wood that I've been carrying around for decades. The story goes that my Grandpa made a small bookshelf for my Grandma soon after they were married. The bookshelf is Chestnut and I remember it in the house where I grew up as a young child in the 1960s. It got moved when that house was sold and was stored in the basement, which repeatedly flooded and the shelves, sadly, were in very poor condition. My sister gave them to me. I determined that nothing could reasonably be done to restore it, and even if it could've been restored it was too small and shallow for anything but paperbacks. So I knocked it apart and stacked the wood, waiting for some special project to use it.
I didn't take a photo of the shelves together, but they were built like you would expect. A carcass, base with a decorative skirt, and on the sides, two rows of holes for shelf pins. there were only two shelves that came with it. The back was very thin plywood that had delaminated and crinkled.
The first thing I had to do after designing the box was to cut out and thickness the stock. I should mention that I resolved to make this entirely by hand, no power equipment at all! I assessed the wood, laid out all the parts and started cutting
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The shelving unit was painted black on the outside, but the inside had been varnished, but this was some type of faux woodgrain technique that I has seen on other furniture that he made or refinished. It had a thick coat of paint over which was a tinted varnish that made it sort of look like wood. No real attempt to comb grain into it was evident and like most of his painting/finishing, it was pretty sloppy. (Sorry Grandpa). The boards were all just under 3/4-inch and my chest would be 1/2-inch stock so there was a bunch of planing to do. It was complicated by the painted material, almost certainly lead paint. So I donned my respirator, and jack-planed off all the paint after cutting most boards to rough length. Then vacuumed and mopped up.
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I had just barely enough wood to make the chest, so I had to be careful with the layout. I Split the long sides down through the row of shelf holes and planed down to remove the holes, but maintain the maximum width.
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Then as is my habit to start off I flatten and surface one face, shoot one end, and joint one edge nice and square.
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First I flatten one side. The chestnut generally planed beautifully, I really like working it. But in some spots the grain ran contrary and caused some significant tear-out. The wood was pretty straight grained, and the boards were narrow, could he have glued up strips, not caring which way the grain went? Lets take a look.
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Yup, nearly every board (even after I ripped them to narrower dimensions) had one or more joins. But once I dressed the ends I could see that these boards were commercially joined with shallow match joints. I do not believe that he did this, so either the wood was purchased, already joined, to make a wider board out of narrow strips, or maybe he did not make the shelves. Maybe he reworked something else into the shelves, or maybe he just refinished it. A mystery, and there's nobody alive to ask. The shelf pin holes were not perfectly aligned, so that's a vote for him drilling them (they weren't gang-drilled). But who know?
So I had to take the flattening the one side slowly, I abandoned the scrub plane and set the jack to a shallow cut and was carful at the edges to avoid blow out.
Once I got into the rhythm, it went smoothly enough. I got all the wood flattened on one side, one edge shot and one side jointed, then the other, prepared for glue-up.
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Glue-up went smoothly. I did try both to match grain and run it all in the same direction, to make the next step easier. Then I thickness the board. I had to remove about 3/16-inch of material. I normally start with a scrub plane, until I am about 1/16th off the penciled-in scribe mark, then a jack down to the just above the line, then a jointer to flatten everything, finally a smooth plane to make pretty. Then trim to final size. Next, the results of this step.
Note: the pix are all sideways (click on them) I couldn't delete the final attached thumbnail so the results are in the next post.
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