The Joiner's Tool Chest

Why a chest

Before shops had walls of pegboard, a joiner’s tools lived in a chest. It protected them from rust, dust, and damage, moved with the worker from job to job, and kept a fixed place for everything. Probate inventories from 17th-century Plymouth list the tools a carpenter owned, item by item and with their value ¹: a kit small enough to pack.

Christopher Schwarz’s The Anarchist’s Tool Chest argues that you can build almost anything with fewer than 50 good tools, and that building a chest and filling it with the right ones is the best way to start ². Whether or not you take on the philosophy, the chest is a good test of casework: big dovetails, a lid that seals, and drawers or tills that slide.

A working kit

A reasonable kit by job, close to what Moxon describes and the inventories list:

• Planes: fore (or jack), jointer, smoothing plane, block plane, rabbet plane, plow, router plane, and a few moulding planes or hollows and rounds.
• Saws: rip and crosscut handsaws, a dovetail saw, a carcase or tenon saw, a coping or bow saw.
• Chisels: a set of bench chisels, a mortise chisel or two, a few gouges.
• Boring: brace and bits, gimlets, an awl.
• Layout: square, bevel, marking gauge and mortise gauge, dividers, a marking knife, straightedge, rule, winding sticks.
• Other: mallet, hammer, holdfasts, sharpening stones, spokeshave, drawknife, rasp, scraper, pincers, nail sets.

Building the chest

The traditional floor chest is a big dovetailed box:

• Carcase: four wide boards, through-dovetailed at the corners, usually softwood like pine. Big tails, few pins.
• Bottom: boards nailed on, grain running across the chest, often tongue-and-groove, so they can move.
• Bottom skirt (plinth): a dovetailed or nailed band around the base, protecting the corners and lifting the chest on its edges.
• Top skirt: a band around the top of the carcase that the lid’s rim closes over, sealing out dust.
• Lid: a frame-and-panel or a solid panel with battens, its rim wrapping the top skirt. A lid stay keeps it from flopping back.
• Handles: rope or iron handles at the ends for two people.
• Finish: paint on the outside, a strong color historically, and bare wood inside.

Size it to your tools: long enough inside for your longest handsaw, deep enough for planes standing in the well, and no taller than you can reach the bottom of comfortably.

Inside the chest

• The well holds the big tools: planes on their sides or standing, saws in a rack along the front or in the lid.
• Sliding tills: two or three shallow trays that slide front to back on runners, holding chisels, layout tools, and small parts. Slide them back to reach the well.
• Racks: a chisel rack or a saw till along a wall.

Try it

Lay out your tools on the floor, group them, and measure the longest saw and the tallest plane. Draw a chest around them with a well and two tills. Build it from 3/4-in. pine with through-dovetailed corners, nailed bottom, skirts, and a sealed lid, and paint the outside.

What to take from this

A tool chest protects a hand-tool kit and keeps it portable; Schwarz argues fewer than 50 good tools build almost anything. Build the chest as a through-dovetailed pine carcase with a nailed bottom, bottom and top skirts, a lid that closes over the top skirt to seal out dust, and sliding tills over a well for the big tools. Size it to your longest saw.