Cherry Toy Chest

It only took me 8 months, but it’s finally finished. Everything is solid cherry down to the drawer bottoms. Plywood would have made it a bit easier with dealing with the expansion in the design, but it was cheaper for me to use solid wood. I tried to sand at little as possible. Everything was hand planned/scrapped, but since I’m still learning I had to hit things with a quick 220 to even things up.

The dovetails were cut on the bandsaw but required a lot of work with the chisel to get them fitting right. It was my first time using this technique (Tilting table, spacer blocks, stop blocks) and I found it to be a bit clunky. There are a lot of setup steps and planning. This will becomes easier with more practice I’m sure.

It took me so long because I was mainly working at night after the kids went to sleep so I had to keep things quiet. An example would be instead of using a tailed router to plow some dados I used a hand saw and chisels. I had to make a router plane out of a hex wrench to clean it up. I also made a beading scratch stock out of a hacksaw blade to do the drawer and trim beading. I would run home from work during lunch and get a quick 20 minutes in to use power tools in the beginning to get things planed, jointed and cut to size on the table saw.

The finish is BLO followed by shellac and WB ploy. On the top of the top, after I laid down the final coat of WB Poly I decided I couldn’t live with a streak of too thick shellac so I stripped it down to bare wood and re-did it. It took me almost five whole minutes using a card scrapper to strip off the finish.

More photos can be found here.

Thanks for looking