Wooden Toolbox, Part 1: Design Considerations

I've been volunteering at a local "Repair Cafe", where several volunteers try to fix stuff that people bring in.  The items can be anything from computers to little toy trucks, vacuum cleaners to jewelry - it spans a wide range.  So far, I've been bringing some tools in my red metal toolbox, but each time I use that toolbox, I have to dump out all of the tools that I definitely won't need and add a bunch of tools that I might need.  This is kind of a drag, so I though I'd make a wooden toolbox specifically for the repair events.

Here's a rendering of what I'm thinking.

Front View

Rear View

My initial thought was to have a drawer at the bottom, a lift-out tray in the upper area, and a space under the tray for more storage.  There is a horizontal divider that separates the drawer section from the upper section.  Since the drawer needs something to stop against when it is slid into its opening, the panel on the rear is full height.  But with the drawer opening on the front, the front panel is only partial height.

So here's where I had to scratch my head about the design of the toolbox.  It has to do with the joinery and wood orientation.  I'm planning to dovetail the box together, but I had to decide how best to do that, and how it might complicate the rest of the piece.

My first thought was to dovetail the ends with the bottom, in which case the grain of the ends would run vertically.  Alternatively, I could dovetail the ends with the front and back - here the grain of the ends would have to be horizontal.

I didn't like the second idea because if the grain on the ends was oriented horizontally, a good jolt to the handle could easily split off the top of the end pieces.  I'm making this out of soft wood and I don't think it would be strong enough in that orientation.

So I chose the first option, with the ends dovetailed to the bottom so the grain of the ends will run vertically.  This also simplified the joinery of the horizontal divider to the ends - the grain will be compatible and I decided to use multiple through mortises and tenons at each end.  That left me to figure out how to attach the front and back panels.

Front panel attachment

It's a little hard to see in the picture, but I've put a groove near the front edge of the horizontal divider, as well as on the vertical ends, that will house the rabbeted tongues on the front panel.

For the back I did the same, grooving the bottom and end pieces to house the tongues of the back panel.

Back panel attachment.  Note that I had to make the 
horizontal divider narrower to allow the back panel to fit.

Putting the groove in the bottom forced me to adjust the dovetail spacing.  The groove will show on the outside at the ends of the bottom, so I moved the rear-most tail in a bit (and adjusted the other tails accordingly) to allow the groove to fit fully in the end pin.

A couple other notes here.  In the first picture above, you can see the upper tray is not the full length of the interior of the toolbox.  This is so I could fit my battery drill at one end standing on the horizontal divider.

Lastly, I'm making this mostly out of reclaimed pine/spruce/fir.  The thickness of most parts will be 5/8" to give a compromise between weight and strength.  The horizontal divider will be 1/2" thick.  The handle will be 3/4" thick oak - with the curve in the handle, I didn't want to risk a break due to lack of strength of soft wood.

I'm interested in feedback on the design.  Do you have any comments on how the front and back panels could have been attached differently?  Also, for the drawer shown in the first picture, I need some way of keeping it in place (and not sliding out) when it is closed in place.  Any suggestions?

Coat Rack, Part 1: Design and Initial Stock Prep

Immediately on the right as we enter our house is a metal coat rack.  A few years ago I embellished it by making cherry "leaves" that sort of match the motif of the rack, and sticking them on the coat hooks.  But it has always seemed like we need something more.  For one thing, we could use more hooks.  We also need a place to throw keys and (in the winter) hats.

The existing coat rack

It doesn't hold the keys - they're hanging on the door lock to the right

SWMBO wanted the design to incorporate the existing metal coat rack.  And she wanted the coat hooks to be at about the same height as they are now.  The width dimension is governed by the wall on which it will reside, which is about 36" wide.  The depth dimension should not be so great that people hit their noggins on it when entering the house.

An internet search gave me some ideas.  And I borrowed from a coat rack Bob Rozaieski had made earlier this year.  Here are some ideas that I messed with.

Version 1 - this is very similar to Bob's design

Version 2 - dumped the top, but the wife didn't like that the upper and lower
curves on the end pieces were similar

Version 3 - changed the lower curve to convex.  Nobody liked this.

Version 4 - Similar to design 1, but internal dividers have concave curve.  Meh.

Version 5 - Upper curve changed to convex.  No good.

Version 6 - lower curve squared off.  Just plain ugly.

Version 7 - Much like version 2, but the lower curve is smaller

I liked version 2 the best, but we settled on version 7, which is very similar.  Karene just didn't like the top-to-bottom symmetry of version 2.

Close-up view of version 7

From the sketchup model, I got my cut list.  I'm using red alder, same as the two shoe shelves I completed last month.

Cut list and a few detail drawings

Starting to break down the stock

Three of the parts I need are thinner than the (roughly) 3/4" thick boards, so I thinned them down using a heavily set scrub plane ( a repurposed #5 with a cambered iron), followed by planing with the grain and finally a smoother.

Traversing with a scrub plane to reduce thickness more quickly

Gluing up the 1/2" thick back

I've got all the parts to rough size now.  Next time I'll write about laying out and cutting the joinery, which consists simply of dadoes and rabbets.  The shelf will fit into stopped dadoes in the sides.  The dividers will fit into dadoes in the shelf.  And the back will fit into rabbets at the back of the sides.

Demilune Table, Part 2: Experimentation

Warning: this one runs a bit long, but it's mostly pics ...

This project has been an exercise in experimentation.  For a couple different reasons, I didn't want to make a three inch wide bent lamination that would be about 36-38" along the curve.

First experiment: making the curved apron in pieces, shown here in pictures.  The plan is to make three separate curved apron pieces that will join to the legs with m&t joints.

The working drawing

On a poplar blank, drew a 10 7/8" radius

Some of the tools used to remove material and smooth the curve (rip saw not shown)

Cut and planed a 1/8" slice from a piece of cherry

Testing to see if it will bend to the 10 7/8" radius - it won't

Thinning the cherry down to 1/16"

Gluing it to the poplar curved piece

This worked well, albeit with a few small gaps

The bigger issue here is grain direction.  At the ends of this piece, the cherry is glued to end grain more than long grain.  I used PVA glue.  Time will tell if this holds.

Second experiment: mortise and tenon joint that will join the apron and leg.  In the picture below, I've placed the middle front apron in position on the drawing and you can see the outline of the leg.

The pencil lines on the poplar are parallel to the front face of the leg.  That's the direction
the tenon would be cut if a mortise was chopped perpendicular into the leg's side face.  This
does not utilize the long grain strength of the apron.

If the tenon was cut in line with the grain of the poplar, the mortise would have a very steep angle.  This is not necessarily a terrible thing, just a pain to lay out and execute properly.  I decided on a compromise and used an angle in between the two.

The compromise angle

I made a small template with the mortise layout and traced it onto the top of the leg.
Those lines helped me cut the angle.  The joint is being tested here in a scrap leg blank

There are issues with this.  But it's a compromise and this table probably won't be seeing any/much abuse - at least not while we own it.

Here's the next issue: there needs to be another mortise on the other side of that leg and there's not a lot of space to put it.  I've thought about staggering the two mortises.  The mortise on left would be full depth for its upper half and just 1/2" deep at bottom.  The mortise on the right would be just the opposite.

Layout of the left front leg mortises

Transferring the lines to a test piece

The test leg with mortises cut: on the right side, the top is full depth (about 1 1/8")
and bottom is about 5/8" deep.  The left side mortise is full depth at the bottom.

The middle apron piece with tenon cut

Left front leg (practice piece) with two apron pieces fitted in their mortises

A nice friction fit

This seems to have worked out OK, but there are a couple of problems with it.  First, small errors in layout or execution of the joints resulted in the apron not following the curve quite right - The combined curve of these two apron pieces is tighter (smaller radius, that is) than it should be.

The second problem is something that really bothers me: I'm not sure about the ultimate sturdiness of the table with this configuration.  Unlike a table with 90° joints holding the piece together, you can't really clamp this undercarriage together tightly without stressing some of the joints or pulling the whole thing out of its semi-round shape.

It got me thinking about alternate ways to make a single piece apron.  I woke up the other morning with a possible solution in my head.  I'd try to glue up several pieces and then shape them to the half round, like in the pictures below, then glue a 1/16" piece of cherry to it.

Bunch of pieces glued together

Then shaped to the half round (not yet smoothed in this pic)

However, it just seemed futile for strength reasons.  In the end, I might have to bite the bullet and make a half round form and glue-laminate a bunch of 1/16" slices of 3" wide wood together.  That's at least 12 slices of 1/16" x 3" x 36"!!  Not my idea of fun.  But hay, if I had just done this from the start, it would have been over a long time ago.

Back to the experiments.  The third experiment had to do with a decorative bead at the bottom of the aprons that is proud of the apron's surface.  The plan is to glue a piece to the underside of the apron.  I put a piece of 1/4" thick scrap under an apron piece and used a divider set at 1/8" to scribe an arc, referencing off the apron.  Then I cut to that line and smoothed a 1/8" radius along that edge.

The test piece with curve cut

1/8" radius along the front edge

There's the test piece sitting below the apron.  It's not the right length,
but it gives the idea and I think it will look good.

Enough for now.  Time to make some decisions about how to proceed.

Demilune Table, Part 1: Design Considerations

We need a small table as a plant stand in front of the kitchen window.  The current table, borrowed from my sister, has two thick books on it to raise the plant to the height we wanted.

Not the ideal situation

I've wanted to make a Demilune table for many years.  So, not knowing any of the pitfalls of the design, I decided to jump in.  Soon, I started to realize all the complications.  There's the position of the front legs.  There's the rotational orientation of the legs.  There's the joining of the legs to a curved apron.  There's making the curved front apron without wood bending capability.

One of the questions fortunately had an easy answer, though there was some butt scratching about it.  Half-oval or half-round?  I love an oval shape, but we had decided the table needs to be about 24" wide and 12" deep.  That makes it a perfect half-round.

In this post, I'm going to walk through some of the design considerations.  This is as much to show readers my thinking as it is for me to work it out in my head.

I have a copy of Bill Hylton's excellent "Illustrated Cabinetmaking", and he's got a two-page section on demilune tables.  I could make this ultra-simple by going with a three-legged table having no curved apron, or I could challenge myself and try something tougher with curved front apron attached to legs.  My biggest challenge is how to make the curved apron, and I'll get into that more later.

Started with the plan view of the half round top

I thought it should have a 1" overhang of the top all around.  The legs will be a little proud of the aprons, so the 1" is from apron to edge of top.

Showing where the aprons will be

The position of the back legs is simple enough.  They'll be at the back corners, with the rear apron mortised into their inside faces and the curved apron mortised into their front faces.  But the front legs are another story.  I tried a couple different orientations.  This first one is with the legs at 45° angles relative to the rear edge of the top.

Front legs drawn, centered on lines 45° from back edge of top

A front view with the legs at that 45° position

It seemed to me that the front legs were not forward enough for front-back stability, so I tried legs at 60° from the top's back edge.

Front legs, centered on lines 60° from back edge of top

A front view with the legs at that 60° position

I liked this a lot better.  The picture in Hylton's book shows the legs closer to this position as well, though it doesn't give any details.

One might notice that the front surfaces of the front legs are parallel to the apron (or parallel to the tangent to the apron at that point), as opposed to being parallel to the back edge of the top.  This is a detail that I'd seen in Hylton's book as well as most online images.  This has advantages for joinery using a laminated apron, but might create issues for other methods.

Hylton shows different ways to work with the curved apron.  One could make a single-piece apron (OK, it's laminated, but one long laminated piece), mortised into the rear legs and joined to the two front legs using bridle joints.  The curved apron could be made via bent lamination, or by using the "bricklaying" technique, building the curve from vertically laminated and offset  pieces that are then cut on a bandsaw and finally veneered.  I don't have a bandsaw, and for various reasons I don't want to laminate the semi-circular full apron.  So I'm going to attempt to make this like I would any rectangular table: with the aprons having tenons that fit into mortises in the legs.

The legs shown above are 1.5" square, though I'll be tapering the legs down to 1" square at the bottom.  I had originally drawn them up at 2" square, but they just looked too big and chunky.  The choice of 3" wide for the apron was not totally random.  The legs will be 28 1/4" long and are only joined via the aprons, so the aprons needed to be reasonably wide.  The 3" aprons in the sketches above and below looked about right, and I think they'll give enough support, so that's what I'll go with.

3" aprons

4" aprons

Update: I've been experimenting with joinery and think I need to make the legs thicker at the top to accommodate longer tenons.  Here's a picture with 1 3/4" square legs that taper to 1" at the bottom.

The table with thicker legs

Unfortunately, it still looks a bit clunky to me.  But I need the mortises and tenons to be deep and long enough not to fail.  I'll get into that more next time.