Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process

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A couple more evenings and a bit more stock preparation. I decided to make the drawer fronts (which will be a little thicker) out of walnut to match the drawer runners & front dividery thingies rather than out of sweet chestnut to match the rest of the chest.

Just to give myself even more of a challenge than I already have, I thought I'd cut all the drawer fronts out of one bit of walnut so the grain goes across the front of the piece (although it'll be broken by the front dividery thingies as they were made out of different bits of walnut). That way if I c*ck up the front of one of the drawers, I'll have to remake it and it'll be nice and visible when that drawer doesn't match all the others.

I started by grabbing a conveniently saved-for-the-purpose bit of American black walnut and marking out the drawer fronts, allowing quite a bit of excess (I actually used the side and base of the chest as a reference, marking the middle of each drawer runner onto the walnut so each drawer front has half a dividery-thingy thickness worth of excess top and bottom and a similar amount on each side):

The big Ryoba came out again to chop it up:

They then got hand planed on the front face and on one edge and shoved through the bandsaw before the second face got hand planed to thickness, leaving me with a nice set of drawer front fodder and a pile of thin bits of walnut that (optimistically) might just about be thick enough (after planing) to be used for box bottoms and linings in the future:

The pile of plane shavings on the workshop floor (which I haven't got round to sweeping up yet) has some brown highlights now.

I rather enjoyed that planing session: ABW is lovely to plane and gives off a really nice smell as it cuts.

It's probably worth noting that the current plan is not to have a drawer in the bottom right of the box (see this slightly out-of-date CAD model), but I thought I'd prepare the drawer front anyway in case I change my mind in the future.

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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