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 a wood workshop, 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
