Penguin Tool Chest #1: Design and Milling

I decided to make a fancy wooden tool chest as a retirement gift for my Dad. Fortunately, there are many inspiring tool chests here on lumberjocks that I was able to use as a basis (such as JaiMaluga22's, jm82435's, Coleby's, and Mathew Nedeljko's). After examining these and many other tool chests, I came out with a design I liked and made a simple version of it in Sketchup:

(not sure why this turned out so blurry here… I must not be getting the image resolution correct and some resizing is fuzzing it)

This drawing only shows one of the 7 drawers so I could view/dimension the interior easily while working on the chest. The design has changed a little as I’ve worked on the project, but the overall dimensions (23.5” x 14.25×11) and layout are the same.

I went to my local sawmill, TC Woods, and picked up lots of walnut, maple, elm, and cottonwood (alas… I thought it was maple originally until I cut into it and noticed the smell). After lots of rough cutting, resawing, jointing, planing, etc, I was able to start the initial glue-up of the panels:

I achieved the 11” width of the boards by gluing up two ~5.5” pieces (small enough for me to run through the jointer while milling). Before the glue-up, I drilled pocket holes for some screws to add strength.

There was still lots to get done at this point, but it was a start.