The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

I decided to use only dowels, versus nails, for safety reasons. With dowels, if the toolbox falls apart from abuse, there are no sharp nails involved.

Mass Production of Saws

I stacked enough blanks to scroll saw 6 saws at a time......



I decided to give the handles 2 coats of red paint.........



Hammers

I first sawed 1-1/4" diameter dowels to 3 inch lengths. I chucked each piece on the old 1939 Montgomery Wards lathe, and used the wire method to burn in a groove on 1 end.  I also sanded that end.  Next, I flipped the blank end for end, and burned the groove in the other end.

I used an old v-groove jig to hold the 3 inch piece, then drilled a 1/2" diameter hole for the handle. 

Squares

I made a batch of 12 squares. It required making lap joints on 24 pieces.  I could have done this using many passes per joint on the radial arm saw, but I decided it was worth the time to set up the dado stack on the table saw.

I put a stop block on the fence, to set the side-to-side location of the cut border. These are 1/2" thick boards lap jointed to 1/4" depth.

Old-Fashioned Hand-cranked Drills

I made a couple of design changes on these to make them easier to make.  For the rotating piece, I reduced the thickness from 3/4 to 1/2" so I could use standard 1/4" axle pins to retain them.  I also made the point 5/16 versus 1/4", so I could drill a 5/16 through hole in the collet piece.

I cut the large OD rotating piece using a hole saw on the drill press.

I made a Youtube video showing one of these old style drills in action........

I made another YouTube video showing how I burned in the decorative grooves:

Wrenches

Screwdrivers

In the picture above, I still need to put "points" on the screwdrivers, which are angles ground on the belt sander.

Toolboxes

I could have cut the 24 degree angles on the scroll saw, but it was much faster to use the table saw.  I set up a jig on the table saw to accurately repeat the cuts for every piece (24 of them for 12 toolboxes)........

This fixture worked really well.

To put the 1/4x1/4 groove in the bottom of the toolboxes, I took each piece to the router table, hand held the piece in its normal vertical orientation, and made the grooves.   They were through-grooves in the 2 sides, but stopped cuts on the 2 end pieces.

I then glued up the boxes with yellow glue........giving toolboxes everywhere!

As my wife knows, "a woodworker can never have too many clamps!"  :)

It would have been faster to air nail the boxes together, but these will suffer abuse and may come apart.  I do not want to have sharp nail edges exposed if the boxes come apart.   I chose to use 1/4" dowels to supplement the glue joints.

Drilling 48 dowel holes for the toolboxes

I made a little pattern piece to located the 2 holes in each end piece on the drill press.  This set-up worked well...

Lots of Tools to make to fill 12 toolboxes!

One Finished Toolbox with Tools

Closing Thoughts

I had to develop some higher production techniques to make 12 toolboxes and the sets of tools.

The hand-cranked drills are the best I ever made.  They work smoothly when you crank them.

Hopefully, there will be lots of happy children at Christmas 2016





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