In my garage, I’m trying to do some simple skill building exercises to increase my precision and knowledge about how to construct useful objects. The recent kerfmaker and half lap projects that I’ve tweeted about were part of this attempt. Last night, after a full day of chasing pixel problems, I thought it would be fun to go into the workshop and use my kerfmaker to try to make a simple tool tote out of some scrap 1/4″ plywood that I had lying around.
I had gotten a tool tote for $1 or so at some garage sale, and had found it so useful that I had constructed a very similar tote myself a month later. But that tote was all butt joints and had the bottom merely cut to size and glued to the bottom, and I used brad nails to hold it together along with glue. I thought that maybe I make a similar (but slightly smaller) tote. I spent an hour and a half, and put together this:
Each of the sides is 8″ side. The front and back are rabetted and have a central dado to take center divider, and a dado to hold the bottom in a recess. The two sides just have the bottom dado. I dried assembled, and things looked “okay” (more on that later) so I glued the side joints, and assembled the four sides and bottom (the bottom just rested in the dado without any glue) and let it dry. I’m going to taper the middle and cut a slot in the center divider to serve as a handle. My experience with the similar tote I made before is that the properly glued joints will be plenty strong to handle whatever load I’m likely to put in it.
It looks pretty good, but there are a few niggly details, most notably that it doesn’t rest entirely flat on the desk. That is because the corners look like this:
The front panel here slightly protrudes. I believe this is because the dado I cut to receive the shot isn’t 100% parallel to the bottom, and so when I clamped the bottom in place, it pulled these sides out of flush/square by about 1/2 mm. Oh well, that’s what my sander is for.
Some other pictures below. If the mood suits me, I’ll finish the tote in another evening or so.
