Seaborne chest part 1

The tool chest for the sea made it on board in one piece, and today I had the opportunity to start a new project.

On the Siem Marlin I was spoiled by having plenty of exotic pallet wood. I even have a perfect 12” wide board of idigbo waiting for me if I ever get back to that ship, provided off course, that no one have used it in the meantime. The wood we have here is by no means furniture grade stuff. All I have managed to find is 1.5” x 6” pine used for construction purposes. I had hoped for some pallets or pallet sides, but we don’t have any. So as usual I’ll try to get by using what is available.

I decided to build a small chest based on the Roy Underhill joiner tool chest, because I have always liked that chest. Furthermore I think it will look OK even with a coat of paint on it. That might be necessary since I am afraid there will be some missing knots etc. which will be hard to conceal.

The major dimensions of the chest will be roughly 8” x 12” x 16”.  I don’t want to build anything that will be too large due to the challenge of getting it home once it is finished.

Stock preparation began by crosscutting the lumber to length. We have got a cheap standard 22” saw with combination toothing on board. I used it for ripping the pieces to half the thickness, which was quite a big job. The pieces actually looked better than I had hoped for straight from the sawing.

I managed to rig up some work holding using a piece of the construction lumber as base and a small piece of wood as a planning stop. The planning stop was clamped to the workbench and it worked great. The best thing though was that I was able to use my scrub plane for dressing the stock. It was so easy I could hardly believe it. 

Nice curly shavings.