Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 19th November 2023
A few little odd jobs done today. Firstly, do you remember the blind pull I made? If not, go back and read this earlier post! It's very much like the drawer pulls, except the hole doesn't go all the way through and there's a "lip" on the inside at the front, so it gives the finger something to pull on.
It's for pulling the front out after unlocking the knobs.
For this one, I used the hand-crank pillar drill. I started with a 25 mm Forstner bit:
Then finished with a 22 mm Forstner bit (with the limit of travel of the pillar drill set such that the tip of the Forstner bit stayed about 1 mm from the far side of the shooting board):
That gave me a 13 mm deep hole; any deeper would have resulted in the tip of the Forstner bit coming out the other side. I needed a 15 mm deep hole. To deal with the difference, I dug out a 21 mm slot drill, put it in a collet chuck and turned it by hand to deepen the central bit of the hole (the brass thing in the picture is just something I turned out of a brass offcut to keep the slot drill central in the hole).
Once that was down to depth, I tidied up the bottom corners with a gouge.
It could then be pressed into place (again without glue as it was a tight fit):
Another little job I did was on the planing stops. I used the milling machine to spot drill, drill 4.2 mm and tap M5: one hole in each planing stop.
I then turned some extremely simple little brass bits (for scale, the head is 9 mm diameter and 6 mm long, the thread is M5 and 4.5 mm long):
The brass bits go in the threaded holes and just provide something to push up & down on when moving the planing stop:
Another quick job: the 4 mm 303 stainless bar I'd ordered arrived in the week, so I fitted the cross-bars to the other two knobs:
I think the next job I'll do is give the chest top surface a quick skim with a smoothing plane and then oil the top and back of the chest, the drawers, the shooting board fences and the shooting board. I'd planned to leave oiling the shooting board until after carving a pattern, but I'm still no closer to having the faintest idea what sort of pattern to carve (or even if I really want to carve a pattern), so I think I'll just leave it for now. I can always come back to it at a later date: I don't see that a coat or two of oil will stop me from being able to carve into the surface.
There are still a few other jobs to do, but I'm definitely on the home straight. The ones that occur to me off the top of my head are:
- Remake the plane tote (I was never very happy with the two-bits-of-plywood-stuck-together plane tote, which was made in a bit of a rush ahead of the trip to France back in June; I've since dismantled it and will make a nicer one as one of the next jobs).
- Make something to stop the bottom drawer (and the plane tote) sliding forward. This will probably just be a "doe's foot" or two that make up the right thickness and will fit in the bottom of the chest before the front goes on.
- Drawer inserts – these will almost certainly be 3D printed and will take a long time to design. I'd been umming and ahing over whether to make them out of wood or 3D print them, but I think I've settled on 3D printing. It has the advantages of being lightweight and infinitely customisable; it has the disadvantage of taking quite a lot of work to get the shapes right to hold the various tools.
There are a couple of other things on the "possibly, but probably not" list (including replacing the plywood drawer bases with hardwood ones), but they probably won't happen so I haven't included them here.
Page 121 of 144
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