New Traveling Tool Box

In preparation for his visit to me a couple months ago for us to build his black walnut split-top Roubo bench, Webmeister Tim got together with a woodworking pal and built a small toolbox which he presented to me as a gift.  It’s 20″ wide x 14″ deep x 16″ high.

I had already decided to retire my traveling toolbox of the last decade-plus, a repurposed and augmented mahogany box originally made for housing a surveyor’s theodolite.  Not that I will be discarding it, but for now it will serve as the repository for small-ish tools gathered for a little boy whose use of them will begin sooner than we can contemplate.

Back to the new box.

The box is exceedingly well-built and sturdy (read: heavy) and capacious so I need to be careful in outfitting it; I still have to haul it to wherever I am working away from the barn.  As to the space inside, I will be tricking it out to have lots of sub-sections and fittings to hold the tools I might need to accomplish a full range of woodworking tasks while away from Shangri-la.

To that end I will be spending many hours over the coming weeks to make of its interior what I want and need.  Probably not as obsessively as did Henry Studley with his tool cabinet, (our only “profile” of Studley is his tool cabinet and based on that I would guess he was wrapped pretty tight) and certainly not as elegantly — there will be no ivory, mother of pearl, or ebony fittings –but I will have stops and starts as I compose the interior of the box.  I will of course be musing silently and not-so-silently about Studley and his interior layout for his preposterously magnificent opus.

Stay tuned on that.

As for the exterior of the box I am undecided.  Do I make it a canvas for fauxrushi, or French marquetry?  Decisions, decisions.  At the moment I am contemplating leaving the recto of the lid alone to let it serve as a work surface.

Thanks to Webmeister Tim’s generosity I have a delightful puzzle to solve.