Chisels, a cabinet, and the Bobist Way

By Bobby Neal Winters

Buying chisels, especially good chisels, is an addiction. They are useful, they are versatile, and they can be beautiful. I love my chisels, and I believe they love me too, even though they extract blood from me from time to time. I think that might be the way they show love.

I’ve gone from having one or two, to having several, and then to having many. Each has its use; each has its purpose; each is beautiful in its own special way.

Chisels need to be taken care of.  This means you need to keep them sharp; you need to keep them clean; you need to keep an imperceptibly thin coating of oil on them.  You take them out; you use them; you care for them; then you put them away. It is an eternal circle.

You need a place to put them.  This is key.

As my chisel addiction has come upon me gradually, I’ve not been intentional in having storage. First I had them in a drawer, then I bought a canvas roll with pockets, and then another canvas roll.

And then another.

I’m up to three canvas rolls for my chisels, and one or two more for my wood carving knives.  Wood carving knives is also an addiction.

A canvas roll as a means of storage is not completely satisfactory.

The rolls are nice, don’t get me wrong. They are a great place to put your chisels if you need to carry them from one place to the next. The problem comes with normal usage: You have to unroll them every time you use them and then put them back. Then unroll them again, the next time. 

And so on.

With all the rolling and unrolling it becomes easier just to leave them laying out, where they can get lost; where they can get something else put on them; where they can get knocked to the floor and chipped; where some other man might just come along and take them. (I shudder just thinking about it.)

I’m building a cabinet for my chisels.

This has happened by accident.  I bought a book on making tool cabinets with the hope there would be a nice, easy to follow plan in.  

This was not the case.

There were lots of pictures of lots of pretty, homemade tool chests, but not a plan for a single one. Here’s a picture of an acorn; now go and build a house.

So I didn’t have a plan, but I had an idea. Build some trays--some drawers with separators in it--for my chisels. I thought I might need to build two. Do the same for my knives. Then after the drawers were built, then build the cabinet.

There might be some great woodworking guru, some skillful master of tools who says this is the way to do it.

Don’t.

This next bit I am going to write carefully because they might be the most important words I’ve written.  If they ever start a religious order based on one of my writings, it will be about this one, so pay attention.

You are going to mess up. You ought to do everything as carefully as possible. Measure twice, cut once. That’s great. But as careful as you are going to be, you will still mess up from time to time.  Order your work so that when you do mess up you will be able to fix it.

For example, if you are cutting a board, arrange your actions so that if you err you will cut it a little too long instead of a little too short. It’s easier to take off a little more wood than to put it back on.

And again, if you are cutting a mortise and tenon, cut the mortise first and then cut the tenon. It is easier to cut a tenon to fit the mortise than the other way around. You can cut the tenon a little too fat and then slowly shave it to fit the mortise.

And finally, which I have just learned the hard way, when you are making a cabinet to hold drawers, make your cabinet first because it’s easier to make drawers to fit a cabinet than to change the whole cabinet to fit the drawers.  

That’s it. That’s what the Bobists will vow.

As I sit here, the glue is drying. It is probably as square as anything I’ve ever made, but it would be nicer and I would be less stressed out if I had made the cabinet first.

After the glue is dry, I will go out and put it conveniently located in my workspace. I’ll wax the drawers and the drawer runners. And I will rest better knowing my lovely chisels have a place to rest.

But it could’ve been better.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.