I have finally finished my toolbox. It kind of drug out at the beginning of this semester. I really wanted to get it finished, so it was a little hard to not cut corners, but I knew it is going to be something to pass down in my family. For those of you who don't know, the walnut that the case is made of was cut down by my Grandpa Bussen off of his land before he died. It has been air drying since then, which has given it a deep rich color with purple hues. It means a lot to me to be able to use this wood from my grandpa and to think about one of my grandchildren eventually owning the toolbox. Here are some pictures:
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| The case has 32 dovetails holding it together. All of them hand cut and fit. |
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| Gluing up the case took help from 3 friends because all of the surfaces to put glue on. I then put on 6 heavy duty clamps to hold the joint tight. The angle of the clamps had to be adjusted until the case was perfectly square front and back. |
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| In this view you can see the dados which were run in the sides before gluing it together. A dado is a groove cut but stacking together a special set of blades on the table saw. Those dados will house the dividers that the drawers run on. |
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| This picture was actually taken much later but it makes since to out it here so you can see the it with the dividers in. On the bottom you can see the strip that I glued on which the bottom drawer sits on and also acts as a bottom lid stop. You can also see the drawer stops that I put in after all the drawers were done. |
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| This is the vertical divider between the 2 second row drawers. I started by using a story stick to lay out and cut a dado in both dividers. I then used my marking gauge to mark the top and bottom of the divider until I found where to cut it to make it fit between the two. Next I remove the material from the divider until it slid into the dados, leaving material in the front for the dovetails. After that I cut the dovetails, scribed them onto the front of the dividers and cut the housing for it. |
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| This is one of the top lid stops. It was applied to the top divider, flushed with my hand plane and shaped on the bandsaw. |
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| This is a very early picture when I first got the drawer fronts fit. You can see I was working on building the drawers, which are sitting on top of the case. |
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| These are the lapped dovetails to attach the drawer fronts to the sides without the dovetails showing through the front. |
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| This is once I got all of the drawers constructed. You can't really tell from this picture, but the drawer fronts were cut from one really wide board, so the grain lines match across all the drawers. |
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| Now the drawers have knobs that I turned out of the walnut. I really wanted to match the progression in the size of the drawers with the size of the knobs. This made the top knobs very small- 3/10th of an inch. They also aren't very long because I was worried about them hitting the back of the lid when it is closed. |
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| This is the lid construction. There are 3 raised panels housed in a frame. |
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| The panels are made from curly maple. Some maple has wavy grain rather than being straight. This causes it to have shimmering lines running across it. |
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| This is after all the construction is finished and just the finishing is left. |
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| This is the first picture of the completely finished toolbox. You can see the shimmering curl in the maple on the lid. The panels are a little thinner than they were supposed to be because I tried to resaw the board. Resawing is cutting it through its thickness. This gives you 2 boards with matching grain patterns. When you arrange them so they mirror one another it is called bookmatching. The center panel is glued up so it is bookmatched down the middle. The outer two panels are also supposed to be bookmatched as well. Howerever, I was so worried about closing the 8 joints when I was gluing it up I rotated the one on the right 180 degrees. Oops. At least only one of my 4 instructors noticed. |
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| Finished drawer fronts. |
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| Drawers open to show off the dovetails. |
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| Lid closed again with the key in it. You can also see that the sides, and top are bookmatched as well, because the boards I got from my grandpa were consecutive cuts from the tree they came from. |
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| The shiplap back of the case. Shiplapping is a technique of overlapping pieces of wood to allow for expansion. Each board has a rabbit (which is a groove at the edge of a board) run on opposite sides and opposite ends of the board. This way you can just put one screw on each side of each board. Each board then holds the board before it against the case. |
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| Here's a random picture of a piece of shiplap I found on the internet so you can have an idea of what it looks like. |
