Hanging Tool Chest

I am rather fond of dry erase boards in my workspaces. It struck me that if I made my new tool chest to have a dry erase front I would gain a large amount of easily accessible tool storage space in my shop without impacting its layout hardly at all. Essentially it just looks like my dry erase board is five inches thick!

I figure it creates 2-2.5 new feet of prime storage space in the shop. That might not sound like much but that space is right at hand, easy to access, and keeps your tool sorted. It may just be me but I think that raising the white board off of the wall also makes it more usable.

Here are some before and after pictures.

I ended up making a simple dove tailed carcass with mortise and tenon supports in the door. The main carcass was done in soft pine and the door in poplar. Why such a stellar choice of woods? Well I figured I would be using this chest for decades if it came out at all well and so I decided to use the wood from my old college futon. Crazy I know but I did not just want to burn it or throw it away after sleeping on it for a decade. When I used up the futon on the back case I switched to poplar as a cheap "hard" wood.

I am happy with how it turned out but I did discover the dirty little secret of hanging tool chests. Each tool holder is custom made so they can hold a lot of tools. However that also means filling one up takes forever. So given how insanely useful they seem to be my new theory of why hanging tool chests fell out of fashion was the investment of time required to build one. I noticed Stanley sold them for a while, but without custom tool holders the tool packing density was not all that great.

I only have the chest about half full. The door holds a basic collection of metalworking files I like to have close at hand. Inside the carcass is a swing out panel housing hand tools. The area below the panel is supposed to be for a bunch of drawers I have yet to make.

In the area behind the panel I keep some saws and layout equipment. As you can see the case is only about half full at present. From here on out I will be adding tools that I find I use frequently and want easily at hand, letting the case slowly fill up.

So these were the first dovetails I ever cut. I just read a few descriptions and then went for it. It would probably be a good idea to practice on scrap, but I really prefer project-based learning. That and I had been reading about dovetails for a while and realized I had been avoiding using them so I jumped in with both feet. Looks like a beaver on meth cut them but I am still glad I used them in the project.

I cut my dovetails, tails first. Here you can see how I marked the pins for cutting.

I test fit the joints during cutting, then, once I had four pairs of pins and tails cut I test fit the entire back carcass.

At this point I used a plow plane to put a groove around the inside of the carcass. The groove captures a piece of plywood that formed the back of the case. I glued it in there with modern wood glue, which was probably a bit of a mistake since it is not repairable, but the carcass is rock solid now that it is dry. So unless it gets dropped onto the pavement I should have nothing to worry about.

I used a similar process to make the carcass for the door. The difference there being I added cross bracing that was mortise and tennoned into the frame. A mortise is hole in the wood, usually rectangular, while the tennon is a peg cut to match that hole.

In the picture here you can see a groove cut in the carcass and next to the mortise. That was the groove that the front of the tool cabinet, and the ceramic-coated sheet of white board material, is captured within the groove.

I decided that I would add most of the tool holders once the body of the tool chest was finished. The exception was the file holders. Since this tool chest was to hang over in the metal working section of my shop I knew I would always want a collection of the 10-inch and 4-6 inch files close at had.

I started by making some test holders. I was trying to see if I could get two rows of files and still have the files quick to remove and return to the cabinet. In the end I decided to just have a single row of files.

I marked and drilled the door supports that I had previously mounted with a mortise and tennon. The file storage works, and is a huge improvement. However if I had it to do over again I would probably go with a removable design like Bob Easton's chisel and gouge rack. Then mount French cleats in multiple places around the shop.