The Boarded Chest I

In "The Anarchist's Design Book" Chris Schwarz writes that a boarded chest should take 2 boards and around 10 hours to build. Apparently I took that as a challenge. I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 months. Albeit I have excuses. The chest was for me and my use so a paying jobs got in the way, moving my house and shop got in the way, and my own thought patterns, like a murmeration of birds, got in the way.

Boarded chests or 6-board chests are the perfect utilitarian canvas to impose your will upon. I had a desire to explore grain painting, not the subtle kind, the wacko far out there stuff, and I wanted to step up the work I've played with, lining boxes with designed paper, on a large scale item like a chest to see how it felt in overload.

I started with a pile of 1x10x10 foot pine boards from the closest home center. I cross cut them to close to the lengths I wanted and then glued up the panels. Sides, front, back, and bottom. I was not worrying about the lid yet.

With the panels glued up I flattened them. I love the texture of traversed planing in a raking light.

Then I squared up the ends and started laying out for the step joint where the front and back panels rest on the side panels.

Instead of really measuring I used a sector and dividers to measure how tall the legs would be in relation to the sides. I don't recall exactly but a 1:6 ratio seems like what I did.

I cut and ripped the step joint, then I planed rabbets in the bottom of the front and back panel and cut dados in the right place on the end panels.

Then it was time for a dry fit.  Everything worked to satisfaction, but the interesting parts were about to begin.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf