Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process

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The next job was to size the base, which was a quick job with the home-made plane again taking lovely end grain shavings:

To open the lid, there needs to be something to get your finger under. To make that, I pencil-marked a simple box on the edge as a rough guide...

... and then attacked it with a 16 mm chisel, tidying up the finish with a card scraper as there was a bit of scragginess as a result of the grain direction:

That gave me a pile of bits that were almost complete...

... so I felt it was time for another dry assembly to test the hinge (and make sure I'd rounded off enough). The assembly starts by putting three side pieces together, then a steel pin is dropped into the brass hinge hole, then the lid is dropped onto the pin and another steel pin put into its other hinge hole. The base is slid into place...

... and then the remaining side pressed on:

The hinge worked first time:

This box is going to be a tea caddy, so I thought I'd label it as such. In true Blue Peter spirit, here's a template I'd made earlier:

I started by knifing around the template and then (by eye) knifed a middle-line (and then reinforced it in pencil mainly for the sake of it showing up in this photo):

I grabbed lots of chisels to give me plenty of choice and clamped some bits of wood to the chest to support the lid while allowing me to turn it round quickly as needed:

The first letter carved:

The rest carved:

Finally, I gave it a very light pass with a smoothing plane:

With that, it was ready for assembly, so I put the fish glue in a cup of hot water to make it less viscous and got everything I needed ready:

Following the David Charlesworth approach, I only applied glue to the sides of the dovetails and to the top two thirds of the pins:

All being well, that should stop any squeeze-out on the inside of the box. The box is now in clamps and we'll see how it looks tomorrow:

I am a hobbyist metalworker and woodworker. I work as an electronic design engineer and spend most of my working days in front of a computer so I enjoy having the opportunity to use my hands and make things in my spare time. I particularly enjoy making tools as I can then use them on other projects. This website showcases some of the things I've made.

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