Woodworking 101: Building a six board chest. Part 1 of 4

What is it?
For many years before things like closets and clothes hangers, much of our stuff was stored in chests. The easiest forms of these were built by most men for their family's use, while more impressive ones were made by professionals. The technique is such that it can easily be scaled up or down based on need.

Why do it?
There was a time when every boy (and more than a few girls) learned some basic woodworking from his father and built on those skills throughout his life, allowing him to make many basic household items. In our "disposable" society, such skills have become the exception, not the norm. Yet, many of us have treasured heirlooms or value antiques for their craftsmanship. Why not take a little time to do it yourself? Throughout the process, you'll pick up some basic skills like using a saw and drill, measuring, basic joinery, and finishing. Any of those can come in handy in home repair. Plus, you'll be able to say, "That? I made that."

How did I learn it?
I've been playing around with woodworking since I was a kid, including things like shop class and Pinewood Derby with dad. But honestly, my father was never super handy, nor motivated to work on projects at the end of the day. My brother turned out to be the truly skilled woodsmith in the family, making heirloom toys and now running his own handyman service. Over the years I became more skilled in things like blacksmithing and tailoring. Eventually I started needing to build props, sets, and staging for renaissance faire acts, which pushed me to learn more and more wood working, but mostly on a large scale.

Last year I helped start a reenactment group and we needed some furniture. I built a basic table with mortise and tenon construction and found I not only enjoyed it, but my prior skills helped ease the process. This summer I decided to try my hand at a chest and found it quite simple, not to mention gratifying!

How do you learn it?
There are a number of patterns on the web, but I'm going to try and make this as basic as I can, giving you each step, links, and pictures. It will likely take a few posts to get it all out there, but I hope it is worth the effort. I'll throw in some optional stuff as I go if you're feeling particularly motivated. So let's jump into it! Before we start, we need some tools and some wood.

Tools
This style of chest has been made, literally, for hundreds and hundreds of years. I know of similar versions used in Norse times, and they remain popular well past the days of American colonialism. Thus, you won't need a ton of power tools if you don't want to use them. However, they certainly will make your life easier! I'll detail most of this using the following, offering hand tool options where possible:

Table Saw (or a good handsaw and miter box)
Power drill (either corded or battery powered, or an auger/hand crank drill if you want to be old school)
Sandpaper (optionally, powered sanding equipment)
Wood glue (Elmer's Carpenters is fine, or any of Titebond's wood glues. I recommend not using Gorilla until you've played with it a bit as it expands and can get messy)
Tape measure
Square (either a small carpenters square, speed square, or my personal favorite, a combination square)

Additionally, you might need the following depending on the options you choose:
Router (with bits sized to your chosen wood)
Hammer
Screwdriver (or #2 bit for your drill)
Rubber or rawhide mallet

Wood
This is a huge topic, but I'll try and keep it very basic for our purposes. First choice is softwood or hardwood? We could go into a big discussion on the differences, but go here for that. For our purposes, we just need to know that hardwoods tend to be stronger than softwoods. On a project like a chest, it all comes down to the weight it has to hold. If this will be fairly small, or if you will only ever have light items in it, then a softwood (any coniferous tree, like pine) can work fine and be considerably cheaper. If you've never done any woodworking before, get pine. It's available at any of the DIY outlets (Lowes, Home Depot, etc) in a variety of sizes, it's cheap, and if you screw up you won't be terribly upset.

For something we want to last the ages, hardwood is your best bet. It certainly costs more, but it will hold up to abuse and handle far more weight with smaller dimensions. Oak is a perennial favorite and has been used in furniture for a very long time. Poplar works well and is much cheaper. Here in the US, maple is very affordable. And, of course, cedar is a popular choice for anything holding cloth due to it's moth-repellent abilities. If you go with hardwood, look around you for a lumber yard instead of using the DIY outlets. I recently purchased wood for a few chests after making my prototype from wood I got at Lowes. The cost went from $100 from the first chest to $63 for the second! Well worth the extra time.

If you do go to a lumber yard, expect a few oddities. The DIY places have been "dumbed down" for us common folk, so they only sell "dimensional" lumber. This means things like 2"x4"s and the like. The odd thing is, a 2"x4" is actually 1.5"x3.5" in size. This is because 2"x4" refers to the width before planing to a standard size. Lumber yards, on the other hand, often sell hardwood by "quarter" sizes. Thus, 4/4 refers to 1" lumber. Here again, this is before planing, and so 4/4 is actually 3/4" thick. Be aware that planing of hardwoods is seldom as smooth as on dimensional lumber and may require extra work to finish it out. Generally, however, at least one side is very good and you can hide any unevenness inside, or work it into the character of the piece. I consider the price savings and variety to be worth the quirks.

The dimensions of this particular chest will be for roughly a 2 feet wide, 12" deep chest that is just over 16" tall. This will provide us with legs that are about 4" tall and allow for a bit of decorative cutting. Using these dimensions, we'll need 12 feet of 12" lumber. If this is dimensional lumber, it will really be 11.5", which is fine for what we need. You can get this in 6 foot lengths if you prefer. Here are the lengths we'll be cutting down to so you can figure it all out.

Front and Back: 2 @ 24"
Sides: 2 @ 16"
Lid: 1 @ 26"
Floor: 1 @ 22.5" or 23" *

*Note: if you would rather make the floor of the chest thinner, you can opt to use plywood. I would recommend picking up hickory plywood for this, 1/4" thick, easily found at the DIY places. You generally need to a get a bigger sheet (at least 2 feet by 2 feet), but then you'll have extra for your next chest. You know you really want 2, anyway.

Next time, we'll measure and cut!