Moulding Plane Organization

I don't have a lot of moulding planes, but the ones I do have never seem to be sitting quite right in their shelf.

The moulding planes and wooden plough plane on a good day (not too messy)

They fall over, get mixed up and generally it bugs me.  So I thought it was time to use up some more old wood and create better organization.  The wood for this project was from an old rickety shelf that was in my old house when I first moved in in 1998.  So the wood is probably 25 years old or more.  The shelf was made of pine 1 x 12's, which are really about 3/4" thick and 11 1/4" wide.  But these boards included the pith, which had cracks and caused warping.

I cut out the pith, flattened one side, straightened the edges and glued the boards back together to get boards approx. 9" wide.

The stock I'm working with, flattened, dimensioned and all cleaned up

Here's an interesting thing about using 1 x 12 wood.  If the boards contain the pith, the rest of the boards are very nearly quarter-sawn.  So I ended up with nice wood that should be fairly stable.

End grain showing quarter-sawn grain

The tough thing about this wood was that it left sticky pitch on my tools very quickly.  I would have thought that in wood sitting around this long, the pitch would have hardened.  But I had to clean my irons and chisels frequently to remove the pitch.  I do like the look of this wood, but the pitch was a real pain in the rear.

The case is a simple rectangular box, dovetailed together at the corners.  Then I chopped stopped dadoes in the top and bottom to receive some (scrap) plywood dividers.

Marked the tails on top and bottom boards, ready for gang sawing

After removing he waste and paring to the lines, using tail board to mark the pin board

First fitting of all four corners - came out pretty good

Routing the bottoms of the dadoes for the dividers.  Had to use my makeshift 1/8" router plane
for one dado that I marked a bit too thin to use the quarter inch iron on the regular router. 

Fitted the dividers and then shaped their front edges

The glue-up went well, though I had to manipulate the clamps to get the carcase square.  When gluing up dovetails, I use small plywood pads and cauls to put pressure exactly where it's needed.

Using an internal corner gauge to check diagonals for square

If you look carefully in the above picture, you can see the little plywood pads under the cauls.  The pads are stuck directly on the tails.  The cauls are also planed a little bit convex so that good pressure is exerted in the middle of the row of dovetails even when no clamp is there.

Can't argue with this

I like the way the quarter-sawn end grain matches the face grain of the mating pieces.  These dovetails came out great!  I feel like I'm getting better at keeping crisp, clean lines, especially with the chisels.  And BTW, the chisels that I recently made new handles for performed extremely well.

I gave the project two coats of shellac, sanding lightly after each coat had dried.  And here it is in it's home.

Appeals to my sense of organization

It may not look like to big a change from the way it was before, but when the planes are in action it will definitely help keep things in order.