Alf
Established Member
Or How To (Maybe) Give The Impression of Being A User and Not A Collector.
As I don't actually finish projects very often, and this one has been particularly long in the making, I'm revelling in the novelty and thus this may get long with lots of pics. There's also much use of gratuitously beautiful and/or desirable hand tools with which I hope to lure potentially lapsed Normites. In other words :!: Caution: Slope :!:
At what point workshop furniture for the exclusive storage of planes or saws got christened a "Till", I know not, but it's a recognised term in the neanderthal interweb world, and who am I to argue? Anyway, I needed one. Urgently. I have a, um... a "few" saws... And workshop stuff is always a good place to out in a bit of practice for us occasional project makers, so I decided to do the job properly. Apart from initial stock prep and a couple of small tiddly bits at the end, it was all done exclusively by hand. No table saw or router came near it.
I started with some old pine from chapel Sunday School benches and old window frames, like this:
and this:
Mix liberally with planer thicknesser to get this:
and this:
First up, the carcass. To get the necessary depth (11" - sorry, I think in Imperial despite my youth *cough*) I had to joint the boards to make wider panels.
Then a rebate was planed along both sides for the back. For the top and bottom, a rebate was run along two cleats that were glued top and bottom - providing a stronger spot to drive screws when hanging the till, and helpfully removing the complication of a stopped rebate. See how that Marples 78 has sailed through that knot? Lovely jubbly.
Then dovetails.
The useful corner clamp tip for holding these rather large unwieldy pieces still while I mark off the pins.
Dry run to make sure it all goes together and that a large handsaw will actually fit okay. Disston thumbhole rip, if you're wondering.
Glue-up with the ply back in place. I like clamp heads - can you tell?
Battens with slots at 1 1/4" centres to take the blades and a 3 1/4" ledge at the bottom to hold the horn of the handles on the larger saws.
But how to utilise the area top right for smaller saws? Why a bracket - and happily I had a defunct old saw handle kicking around that fitted the bill.
After something of a hiatus, I then started on the doors. After dabbling with the idea of tambours, I eventually opted for a pair of frame and panel doors. So first I ploughed the grooves in the rails and stiles.
Perfect.
Then I chopped the mortises. The wooden handscrew both holds the stiles steady and the jaws greatly reduce any risk of blowing out the mortise walls.
Not bad, eh?
All eight mortises chopped square and to the necessary depth.
Then onto cutting the cheeks of the matching tenons.
Look, Ma - arty black and white!
Then trimming the cheeks using the router plane trick. Ooops, did I say a router'd never come near this? Oh dear...
Final saw cut to form the haunch that fills the groove rather than leave an ugly gap.
Test fit, and it's all fair.
On to gluing up a pair of panels to go in the frames. The limitations of recycled materials kicked in big time, and they had to end up as something of a mixture in appearance from one board to another.
Approximately two and a half years later, they were trimmed to length. I did mention the gratuitous nature of some of these pics, didn't I...?
Planed true and flat.
Couldn't resist putting a wipe of shellac on them to see how they'd look. But back to business, and pausing briefly to make a panel gauge, the panels were gauged to final dimensions.
Then the panel raising plane I'd stopped off to make earlier in the project was used to raise the panels.
Then cleaned up with scraper and 220 grit.
A bevel was freehanded on the reverse so the panel would fit into the groove and a dry run showed all was good.
Some straight-grained oak scrap was driven through a dowel plate to turn it into pegs in order to make draw bore joints.
A blow-by-blow account of the draw boring is on my blog, but just to prove that not even an electric drill got a look in on the action:
A finished joint. Tight as a drum and not a drop of glue.
Slide in the ready finished panel before completing the frame. That's important - trying to put the panel in afterwards is a bit tricky...
Cut off the horns, plane the frame square and flush, and apply a coat or two of garnet shellac.
Then to hang them. An awful lot of piano hinge of doubtful loveliness has been hanging around the workshop for some years, so piano hinge it was. I've noticed many a tool cabinet has fixed the hinges this way, so I went with it. It's pretty easy, and you don't get a huge expanse of brass hinge dazzling you when you open the doors to show off your tools. Er, I mean, get to your tools in order to labour over dead tree. Oh, who am I kidding? A combination of push drill and spiral ratchet screwdriver did the job admirably.
Oh yes, at some point I painted the outside of the till. The old pine was not lovely to look at, so why not. By the time I've finished hanging things all over it, like this bowsaw, you wont be able to see it anyway...
Almost done, but first a pair of door knobs, also made from old window frame.
And a few saw holders for the Wenzloff saws, so their lovely looks are on display. The bandsaw and a drum sander did come into the picture here - as well as the lathe for the knobs - but it was a forgivable lapse as I saw the winning post finally in sight, wasn't it?
The finished article.
Et voilà!
It's a long way from the works of art such as Waka's tool cabinet, but it's holding nearly all my saws ready to be used and I got to practice all sorts of stuff and have fun doing it. More fun than hacking up a sheet of ply and whacking it together with biscuits or screws anyway. That's a result. Proof that I do actually use the tools sometimes is always helpful too. 8-[ Thanks for looking. If you got this far, well done. Wanna buy a saw...? :wink:
As I don't actually finish projects very often, and this one has been particularly long in the making, I'm revelling in the novelty and thus this may get long with lots of pics. There's also much use of gratuitously beautiful and/or desirable hand tools with which I hope to lure potentially lapsed Normites. In other words :!: Caution: Slope :!:
At what point workshop furniture for the exclusive storage of planes or saws got christened a "Till", I know not, but it's a recognised term in the neanderthal interweb world, and who am I to argue? Anyway, I needed one. Urgently. I have a, um... a "few" saws... And workshop stuff is always a good place to out in a bit of practice for us occasional project makers, so I decided to do the job properly. Apart from initial stock prep and a couple of small tiddly bits at the end, it was all done exclusively by hand. No table saw or router came near it.
I started with some old pine from chapel Sunday School benches and old window frames, like this:
and this:
Mix liberally with planer thicknesser to get this:
and this:
First up, the carcass. To get the necessary depth (11" - sorry, I think in Imperial despite my youth *cough*) I had to joint the boards to make wider panels.
Then a rebate was planed along both sides for the back. For the top and bottom, a rebate was run along two cleats that were glued top and bottom - providing a stronger spot to drive screws when hanging the till, and helpfully removing the complication of a stopped rebate. See how that Marples 78 has sailed through that knot? Lovely jubbly.
Then dovetails.
The useful corner clamp tip for holding these rather large unwieldy pieces still while I mark off the pins.
Dry run to make sure it all goes together and that a large handsaw will actually fit okay. Disston thumbhole rip, if you're wondering.
Glue-up with the ply back in place. I like clamp heads - can you tell?
Battens with slots at 1 1/4" centres to take the blades and a 3 1/4" ledge at the bottom to hold the horn of the handles on the larger saws.
But how to utilise the area top right for smaller saws? Why a bracket - and happily I had a defunct old saw handle kicking around that fitted the bill.
After something of a hiatus, I then started on the doors. After dabbling with the idea of tambours, I eventually opted for a pair of frame and panel doors. So first I ploughed the grooves in the rails and stiles.
Perfect.
Then I chopped the mortises. The wooden handscrew both holds the stiles steady and the jaws greatly reduce any risk of blowing out the mortise walls.
Not bad, eh?
All eight mortises chopped square and to the necessary depth.
Then onto cutting the cheeks of the matching tenons.
Look, Ma - arty black and white!
Then trimming the cheeks using the router plane trick. Ooops, did I say a router'd never come near this? Oh dear...
Final saw cut to form the haunch that fills the groove rather than leave an ugly gap.
Test fit, and it's all fair.
On to gluing up a pair of panels to go in the frames. The limitations of recycled materials kicked in big time, and they had to end up as something of a mixture in appearance from one board to another.
Approximately two and a half years later, they were trimmed to length. I did mention the gratuitous nature of some of these pics, didn't I...?
Planed true and flat.
Couldn't resist putting a wipe of shellac on them to see how they'd look. But back to business, and pausing briefly to make a panel gauge, the panels were gauged to final dimensions.
Then the panel raising plane I'd stopped off to make earlier in the project was used to raise the panels.
Then cleaned up with scraper and 220 grit.
A bevel was freehanded on the reverse so the panel would fit into the groove and a dry run showed all was good.
Some straight-grained oak scrap was driven through a dowel plate to turn it into pegs in order to make draw bore joints.
A blow-by-blow account of the draw boring is on my blog, but just to prove that not even an electric drill got a look in on the action:
A finished joint. Tight as a drum and not a drop of glue.
Slide in the ready finished panel before completing the frame. That's important - trying to put the panel in afterwards is a bit tricky...
Cut off the horns, plane the frame square and flush, and apply a coat or two of garnet shellac.
Then to hang them. An awful lot of piano hinge of doubtful loveliness has been hanging around the workshop for some years, so piano hinge it was. I've noticed many a tool cabinet has fixed the hinges this way, so I went with it. It's pretty easy, and you don't get a huge expanse of brass hinge dazzling you when you open the doors to show off your tools. Er, I mean, get to your tools in order to labour over dead tree. Oh, who am I kidding? A combination of push drill and spiral ratchet screwdriver did the job admirably.
Oh yes, at some point I painted the outside of the till. The old pine was not lovely to look at, so why not. By the time I've finished hanging things all over it, like this bowsaw, you wont be able to see it anyway...
Almost done, but first a pair of door knobs, also made from old window frame.
And a few saw holders for the Wenzloff saws, so their lovely looks are on display. The bandsaw and a drum sander did come into the picture here - as well as the lathe for the knobs - but it was a forgivable lapse as I saw the winning post finally in sight, wasn't it?
The finished article.
Et voilà!
It's a long way from the works of art such as Waka's tool cabinet, but it's holding nearly all my saws ready to be used and I got to practice all sorts of stuff and have fun doing it. More fun than hacking up a sheet of ply and whacking it together with biscuits or screws anyway. That's a result. Proof that I do actually use the tools sometimes is always helpful too. 8-[ Thanks for looking. If you got this far, well done. Wanna buy a saw...? :wink:
