Saturday, December 27, 2014

Tool Cabinet (Almost Done)

Drawers, drawers, drawers. Why is it always the drawers that hold up completion? My hand tools were starting to add up and I had several layers of them in a drawer in lower cabinets. With the purchase of another Lee valley plane it seemed like it was time to build a better place to store them. I'm not entirely sure what I need in a wall cabinet so in some ways this is a prototype though I will likely use it for several years. I kept materials simple using poplar and baltic birch plywood. The joinery was through dovetails on the case and finger joints for the doors. The first major mistake came with the finger joints and will be the reason that I keep the doors open most of the time. I flipped one of the doors when cutting the grooves for the plywood panels and as a result the finger joints run top to bottom on one door and left to right on another. Not a huge mistake especially when the doors are open but noticeable when the doors are closed. Rather than trying to create too many fitted locations for little bits and pieces I opted for drawers. My rough sketch plans showed four columns of three but a second mistake resulted in the drawer section being split into three instead of four. We'll call this one a design modification. The only real impact was that I find that drawers that are longer than they are wide slide better in their opening. These are almost square so it shouldn't be too bad. Everything you see here has been finished, and the only thing outstanding is the drawers. I'm hoping to get to those in the next couple weeks. I'm finding even the little shelves are handy though. The only issue is that things get pushed to the back and are hard to retrieve. Drawers should help that.

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