i'm dan smith this is my shop in maine and this is a tool chest that i built to store some of my favorite tools. my idea when i designed this was to create a chest that had tools that were very
essential tools for home woodworking, accessible very easy to get to without multiple moves to get to my favorite tools. my two sons and i designed a tool chest
that i've built in missouri about 20 years ago. it sufficed for the tools that i had out there but i took the ideas from that tool chest and i created this one with another layer of allow me to access tools deep from within the chest without having to struggle to get to them. i like to have all my saws on the left-hand side.
i like to have my favorite planes on the right-hand side and then i sort of designed it with majority tools that i use a lot close by and then as i get deeper into the chest i'm less likely to use the tools and i just keep them as i need when i get to that later one of the things that i came across
both in this tool chest and my tool chest back in missouri is that having large mallets on the outer cabinets requires that you cut a bevel into the drawers. so this drawer specifically is cut in. it has to be thicker in depth to allow the cabinet to close without hitting. hand-cut dovetails were used to hold the shelves for each one of the planes.
i've always liked the look of spline miters so i made sure to have exposed joints at the corners. when i looked at the type of wood to use i wanted a contrast between dark and light wood so we went with mahogany the darker colors ash for the structural part of the cabinetry the hardware is mostly marine grade
i use brazo hinges and marine portal closing devices for the cabinetry i spent a lot of time out here in the summertime boat building and doing cabinetry in the wintertime it's used mostly for storage of these boats it's a pole barn construction i designed it with in-floor heating so that i didn't have the dust being blown
around by a forced-air of system it's very important to shop like this storing boats to keep the humidity at a stable level so i actually added humidification system to add moisture in the wintertime and then in the summertime we have a dehumidifier as well when my boys were little i look for a project that would involve them was
woodworking and i've been fascinated with boat building and built a canoe so i got them involved and helping me figure out a boat that we could build together as a family when they were about eight and twelve years old respectively we started building this boat and completed it about eight years later
and
