It requires one sheet of 3/4” shop-grade birch plywood and one sheet of 1/2” shop-grade birch ply. In the meantime, here are some details about the project that I think are interesting:ġ. The entire process is being filmed at F+W Media Inc. But it had to be built with tradition shackled and gagged in the trunk of my Toyota. To be a success, it had to function just like a traditional chest. In some climates, their tools might be piles of rust by the time they finish building a chest.Īnd so I have reluctantly spent the last few weeks designing a chest that uses home center materials, home center joinery and only 16 hours of shop time to complete. But not everyone can spend a month of Sundays building a chest to protect their tools. When it comes to building a chest, I prefer the old methods.
Today, I built the entire shell and lid of a chest in less than five hours.
These chests take me about 40 to 50 hours of pedal-to-the-metal work to get ready for finish. I’ve now built more than a dozen traditional tool chests entirely by hand.
