Mini Anarchist Tool Chest (ATC) - An Overview

 

It took about 174 hours but it is completed.  I made a mini version of Chris Schwarz's anarchist's tool chest.  In the summer of 2020 I was signed up for a class at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking to take a class from Megan Fitzpatrick to make the full sized chest.  Like the rest of the world, I spent the summer sheltered in place.  In fact, I build a medium sized Japanese carpenter tool chest so I could bring my tools to the class.

I still wanted to make an ATC and decided a mini version would be helpful for two reasons: I thought it would be nice to have a smaller and lighter tool chest for when I go woodworking at my dad's an hour away from me, since it is a mini version I still could have the option of taking the class in the future to make a full sized version.

I will post about the details over time.  Today is an overview.  The carcass and skirting have dovetails and they are done in opposite directions to give max strength.  The lid has through tennons.  I used a mixture of 3/4" pine and 1/2" poplar from big box store.  The center of the top is cherry with some ebony inlay to give a pop to the otherwise all black exterior when it is opened.

The outside is two coats red milk paint then two coats of black milk paint followed by 6 or 8 coats of shellac and wax.  The interior used either garnet or blond shellac followed by wax.  There is a big dovetailed drawer on top from 1/2" poplar.   In the future, I will likely sub-divide the drawer.  Hardware is from Horton Brasses and the chains are from Rockler (a bit delicate as designed for smaller boxes so I put two on it).

Right now, I don't have that many tools for the inside of it.  I am looking forward to buying the tools.  What I did was put in tools I use daily for the workbench or put in some from the medium sized tool chest (which is filled and I need to do a post on that some day).  I'm not in a rush to fill it as it is likely 6 to 9 months before I will get the Covid-19 vaccine and be able to visit my elderly dad and woodwork.  I am looking forward.  It should hold the tools I mostly need.  It's not like this smaller chest is all I own and I'm not going off to the wilderness to work from it.

Rather than write one long blog (and then leave me scratching my head for weekly blog content), I will post a series of blogs outlining what I did to make it and some of the rational for some of the decisions.  One could argue that this posting should be the last in the series.  I am not writing a mystery novel.  Based on work, I like to start with the bottom line message then go through all the detail then summarize the message.  I am adopting that format here.  In fact when I put photos, I am always conscious of the first photo for two reasons: it's the image that is shown when the blog is minimized and I want to pick the one key photo, when you open up the blog I want to you to see the end result initially so that you can then decide how much you read.  This also reminds me of when I wrote on the school paper and you used that inverted pyramid with the most important info at first and less important info as you read down.