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A long time ago in a garage attached to my house, I started a project. It was December 2023, and I had decided that I needed a place to store my hand tools. Instead of designing my own project, I followed Logan’s plans for his Dovetailed Curly Maple Tool Chest, though I substituted hard maple for curly (this was a mistake, hard maple is a huge pain in the ass). I assumed I would be putting my tools in the chest by mid-January, maybe February tops. But a funny thing happened, a thing that tends to happen for every project I undertake that doesn’t have a set deadline… the original goal went out the window. What follows is a timeline of what should have been a “4 day” project according to Logan.
Day 1: Spirits are high, chose my project and picked up the lumber. Found a great deal on S3 assorted hard maple at Menards.
Prep work.
Day 2: Excellent forward progress, started panel glue-ups.
Day 3: Cut first dovetails on the PantoRouter. They weren’t quite perfect, but they were serviceable.
Day 5: First mistake: started cutting pins with the board facing the wrong direction. Spent several hours making unrelated Christmas gift on the band saw to sooth the pain.
Day 8: Unable to get dovetails on the PantoRouter perfect; unsure who is at fault, me or the machine (probably me).
Days 9-20: No discernible progress on project
Day 21: Glued up single panel
Day 22: Panel remains in clamps while I decide to tackle another unrelated project.
Day 30: All dovetails finally cut to varying levels of quality. Cleaned up the shop in preparation of next steps.
Day 31-53: No discernible progress on project
Day 54: Cut the grooves for the bottom of case and lid. Router bit backed out and blasted through the back of lid like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. (For what it’s worth, Logan had the exact same issue in the exact same place in his project) Spent the next hour after that struggling with the fitment of the bottom of the chest. Feeling pretty defeated. Finally was successful and completed the glue-up of the case.
Feeling optimistic…
Day 56: Solved the same fitment issue for the lid in 10 minutes. Glued up the lid. Feeling good about the project, though as I was leaving the shop I noticed that the dust extractor hose got too close to the propane heater and melted.
…while the shop almost catches fire.
Day 57: Sanded case and lid, fixed a bunch of small errors. The project actually looks great and I’m feeling good. Headed to Menards to pick up more assorted hard maple for the tray. Turns out the local Menards no longer carries assorted hard maple.
Days 58-283: Move the nearly-completed project around my shop while I work on other things.
Day 284: Start to mortise out the hinges.
Days 285-339: No comment.
Day 340: Finished mortising for the hinges. Installed the cheap stopped hardware store hinges and promptly watched them fail. Ordered nice hinges from Brusso instead.
Day 353: Adjusting the mortises for the new hinges.
Day 354: Started installing the hinges and making final adjustments. Hard maple continues to defeat me, screw gets broken off and stuck.
Days 354-603: Somehow end up finishing installing the hinges, then dumping the leftover parts into the chest.
The project was stuck at this spot for a long time.
Day 604: Threw all my hand planes on top of said extra parts while trying to clean the shop. The chest is finally fulfilling its original purpose.
Day 628: Unload the chest. Chamfer any edges that need chamfering and start finishing with wipe-on-poly.
Day 633: “You know what, I should really build the tray too.”
Day 634: Start cutting the dovetails for the cherry tray. First one turns out crappy, and I stabbed myself with the chisel once, but cutting dovetails by hand is actually kind of fun.
The dovetails look better in this picture than they actually are.
Day 635: Finish dovetails on the tray. None of them turned out that great, but good enough for a first attempt.
Days 636-642: Many coats of wipe-on finish applied.
Day 643: Project is finally complete and filled with tools. Well, mostly complete, I need to add a few dividers and such, but what project is ever really finished?
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