Introduction: Dovetailed Blanket Chest With Hand Forged Hinges

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About: I work wood but I also have studied chemistry

Hi everyone!

Here is how I built a commissioned blanket chest. I like the concept of traditional cedar hope chests, where the wood's essential oils serve to repel bugs from wool items. However, I am not a big fan of the looks of cedar, it is quite impossible to find knot-free, is hard to finish and yellows over time. So, I decided to use cedar only for the bottom of this chest so as to reap the insect-repellent benefits while making my life easier and allowing, in my opinion, a better aesthetic.

The hinges I could find were either not the look I wanted, or too expensive. Because I never know what's good for me, I decided to forge my own. I am by no means an expert, as these were my first hinges and also my first time forging, but I outlined the steps below so you can avoid my mistakes if you decide to give it a go as well!

All aboard now, onwards for a 60+ hours work journey! Shavings, blisters, swear words, burns, satisfaction, beer and sawdust included!

Supplies

Tools

Hand

Layout tools (pencil, compasses, squares, ruler, tape measure, marking knife!)

Planes (jack, jointer, block, smoothing, combination, router)

Screwdrivers

Set of chisels and mallet

Hacksaw

Nail set

Saws (cross-cut, rip-cut, dovetail, coping)

Sharpening stones!

CLAMPS CLAMPS CLAMPS CLAMPS SO MANY CLAMPS

Hammer, forge and anvil, if making your own hinges!

Borax flux

Trammel points

Power

Drill with bits

Sander with paper assortment

Router

Planer and jointer

Materials

Wood

Maple (1" thick, for carcass, lid and skirt)

Cedar (1" thick, for bottom and till bottom)

Quarter sawn red oak (3/8" thick, for breadboard ends and till side and lid)

Metal

1/8x2x24" soft steel stock

3/16" diam. soft steel rod for pins

Misc.

Shellac flakes and denatured alcohol

Wax paste (diy, see below)

Carnauba or furniture wax

Steel wool 0000

Painter's tape

Sandpaper grits assorted

Finishing nails

Slotted screws

Rags etc.

Italicized means optional!

Pictured, from left to right, quartersawn white oak, red cedar, hard maple

Step 1: Mill That Lumber!

Nothing new here. If, like me, you bought rough board, you have two options. Either plane everything by hand for 3 days, making wheelbarrows of shavings and some phat muscle gains along the way, been there, done that for my tool chest;

or, hear me out there,

make a very good friend with a very well equipped workshop and plane, joint, resaw everything in one big afternoon while having fun.

Your call really! I went with option n°2 :)

I laid out my panels and cut my wood so that once glued, the panels would be at the final thickness but have an extra inch in both length and width. This allows for fine tuning of the squareness of joints with hand tools before glue-up as well as extra space for squaring the panels off once the glue has set and before laying out dovetails.

If you feel guilty using power tools or asking a friend to use theirs, as Vic Tesolin put it: "In that shop are machines. Machines that I call my apprentices. They do the things that I’m not interested in doing by hand, like breaking out lumber. I haven’t named any of my machines yet, but I might." Here is a link to that article, it's a good short read!

Step 2: Dovetailed Carcass

First, I glued my panels. Not much to it, once the lumber is S4S. I like to sandwich two adjacent pieces in the vice and take a few passes on the edges that will be glued together with my jointer plane to ensure a gap-less fit (see the photos at step 12 of my guitar ible). Careful that there is such a thing as too much clamping pressure which can cause joint starvation by squeezing out all the glue, as well as panel warping. Here is a great process by Jim Probst.

Once the glue has set, I take my jointer plane to the panels on both sides to bring them to true flatness. Then, I trim length and width to the final size, while making sure that everything is absolutely square.

Once you have all 4 panels glued and sized, hopefully arranged with glue lines scattered so that you do not have a single glue line that goes around the whole carcass and could be a potential failure point, it is time to start laying out your dovetails! I do not have many pictures of the dovetailing process because it has been done before, but if there is demand I can make an i'ble only on my dovetailing process.

Very good guides to dovetailing can be found online and in books. I am by no means an expert, but I learned mostly from Matt Estlea and Chris Schwartz. Now I can whip out a half decent dovetail about half of the time so I'm pretty happy with how it's going. Every project, I get better. Especially when the project has 66 dovetails in 3/4 inch hard maple...

Here are a few tips and outline of the steps I take (In my opinion, having a rigorous process is the most important aspect to being consistent and efficient! Else you spend time going back and forth and wondering whether you've done things while forgetting others)

First, I lay out the tails with a pair of dividers as described by Schwartz in the link above

Then, I cut the tails and do not clean the sides of the tails with a chisel or sandpaper after my saw cut (very important! stay square folks). I do clean the corners with a small chisel to remove any piece of wood that would prevent assembly. The waste is removed with a chisel while slightly undercutting to make sure the joint can bottom properly when assembled.

Then, I transfer my tails layout on the pin board and cut the pins.

I then try to drive my tailboard in, gently, with a mallet. When it inevitably binds, I try to locate where from feel and looking at friction marks on the tails. I then carefully pare down the area with a chisel and try to drive it in again. I'd rather do this three times than remove excess material and end up with a gap to fill.

All of this is repeated for 4 boards and the carcass is dry-assembled fully once to make sure everything is in order.


Step 3: The Till

The till front (red cedar) and bottom (quarter sawn red oak) are installed as glued tenons in the panels. The till's back and sides are the carcass itself. The lid (QS red oak, also) pivots around two 10 mm poplar dowels drilled in the lid and in the carcass. A chamfer is planed then rounded to allow the lid to rotate around these pivot points without hitting the carcass.

For the back and sides joinery, with the carcass assembled, I measured the inside width. I cut the lid to this exact length, and the front and back to this lenght plus one inch. I then rabbeted a 1/2" tenon on each side of the front and back pieces, and layed out and routed corresponding mortises in the carcass, slightly deeper than 1/2" to ensure a flush fit and no problem bottoming the joinery.

For the lid, I drilled a 10 mm hole on each end (see pictures) and used a dowel centre finder to mark the corresponding location on the carcass. I drilled the corresponding holes with a collar on the drill bit to avoid drilling through, which at this stage would have been really sad :)

Step 4: Cedar Bottom

The bottom of the chest is made out of red cedar. Cedar is enjoyable to plane and can make smooth shavings, but it is prone to tear-out due to the many knots. So don't frustrate yourself trying to achieve a mirror finish with a plane and accept that you will have to sand it!

I simply glued up a panel 3/4 inch wider and longer than my carcass, routed a 1/2" deep, 1/2" tall rabbet on the underside and all around that panel. I then ploughed a square 1/2" groove l around the carcass to accommodate the bottom panel (not showed in pictures, sorry!). The bottom is not glued to the carcass and has an extra 1/4" of wiggle room in each direction so that wood movement is unimpaired and does not lead to stress on the carcass. This does not show inside the chest, as the top of the panel is not rabbeted.

Step 5: Lid

The lid is made of a panel of maple and two breadboard ends made of quartersawn oak, to ensure that the lid remains planar with changes in moisture and temperature. Here is a link with a few different methods to achieve breadboard ends.

I was not aware of the proper way to join breadboard ends so no gap appears over time,but I could have found out about it if I spent 5 minutes on an internet search... I'll do that for the next one!

I glued my maple panel, cut and planed it to size, and I then sized my breadboard ends so that, after taking in account the depth of the tenon and mortise, I would end up with a 3/4" overhang on the front and sides.

Step 6: Breadboard Joinery Accentuated, Details

The breadboard ends are glue to the wood panel with a tongue and groove joint. I first considered leaving that joint flush, but because we have two different wood species, and because it is only glued on half the length, I think it was bound to open and close a bit over time and that the flushness would be lost to wood movement. So I decided to chamfer slightly both sides of the joint to accentuate its presence rather than try to make it seamless (see photos).

I then glued the breadboard ends halfway along the length, stopping at the joint of the central panel so as to allow free wood movement to prevent splitting the panel.

I finally rounded over the side and front (but not the back) edges of the lid with a router. This can be done just as well with a block plane by first chamfering a 45° bevel, then two more, then 4 more until a round profile can be refined with a rasp or sandpaper.

Within 2 hours of doing all this, the breadboard ends were not flush with the panel any more, by about 1 mm. This is by design, and shows that the wood can move freely as intended!

Step 7: Dovetailed Skirt

After dovetailing the carcass, this should be child's play! Only 12 more dovetails to cut :) The skirt is also made of maple. Helpful tips on how to make a dovetailed skirt can be found in Chris Schwartz's The Anarchist Tool Chest.

I start by dovetailing one corner and leaving the two pieces extra long by about an inch. Aligning this corner on my carcass with clamps, I then use the carcass to make a precise knife line on the inside of one side of the skirt. From this knife line, I mark the thickness of the matching piece and cut then plane my endgrain to match this thickness. I dovetail this corner, once again leaving my board extra long. I then clamp that "U" or "C" shaped skirt on the carcass and mark two more knife lines for the final piece, repeating the process.

For aesthetic reasons, I kept the skirt and carcass tail on tail and pin on pin. If you will be painting or if you are looking for maximum structural integrity, you can alternate an have your tails on the skirt overlap the pins of the carcass. For my purposes, this was unecessary, but I did it on my tool chest that sees a fair amount more abuse day to day..

If you sand the carcass later, do not sand too much where the skirt is to be glued or you will have a poor fit!


Step 8: Front Skirt Arch

Arches are cool! Let's make one!

This was a compromise for me between the heavy look of a full skirt and the distracting convolutions of extra volutes and coping exercises... This arch is not compound or anything fancy, it is just a section of a very large diameter circle that I drew using trammel points. I clamped the front piece of the skirt (the only one receiving an arch) in my vice, marked a line from the middle of it down the workbench and planted my extra large "compass" on the line, playing with the diameter until I was satisfied with the outcome.

With the arch drawn, I made some relief cuts with my cross-cut saw, knocked out much of the waste cross-grain with a chisel and mallet then refined the shape with a spokeshave. I barely sanded the edge of this so I wouldn't cut myself holding the piece, but I tried to keep it as sharp as I could. I don't think a rounded edge on this would look nice... Any thoughts?

Step 9: Sanding the Insides, Glueing

Now that we know that everything is assembled, everything is disassembled!

The inside of the chest will be left unfinished to allow that cedar aroma to permeate, and also because I like the feel of raw wood and wool better together.

The inside parts of the carcass, the lid and all till parts are sanded progressively to 320 grit, dampened with a rag and sanded at 320 again after drying. Smooth! Then, I applied painter's masking tape on the inside of the dovetails to try to catch most of the glue squeeze out before it got a chance to touch the wood. This mostly worked but I still had some cleaning to do in one corner... One final dry rehearsal involving all clamps to make sure I was well within the work time of my glue and I assembled and clamped everything, and let it sit clamped overnight!

Step 10: Make Your Own Moulding

From leftover red oak, I cut and hand planed to S4S some 3/4" square profile sections of wood. I then clamped my router in my workbench, because I do not own a router table, and with a clever setup of bench dogs and clamps I routed a cove in these, the radius of which matches the radius of the lid (3/4").

Step 11: Mitre, Nail and Glue Moulding

This is quite simple, but you want to get it right. First, I cut a 45° miter on one end of two sections of moulding. Then, I butted these on the skirt and held them tightly to form one corner. At this stage, using two pieces allows you to align perfectly with your corner as well as making sure that the matching angles are indeed gapless. Holding one piece of moulding in place, I scribe a fine line while registering my marking knife flat on the carcass and I mark the waste (see pictures), to ensure a great fit. Once this is cut, I drill some evenly spaced pilot holes, align it once again in the corner, and nail it in place with finishing nails, and chase the nail heads in.I repeat this going around the whole carcass.

Step 12: Hinges Part 1: Forging

Here are a fewlinks on how to forge strap hinges by hand. The first one is the one I found most useful!

From the 1/8 stock, I cut two 18" sections for the lid part of the hinges.

I then drew these out to a fine taper, pushing a "blob" of extra metal to the end that I then flattened into a decorative round end (please pardon my lack of proper vocabulary!). All this shaping can be done with the metal cherry red to a bit hotter but for the next step, the metal will need to be considerably hotter!

I then folded over the bottom 3 inches of the hinge strap, bending around the metal rod that would become the hinge pins as a template for the hinge barrel.

Then, I spread some borax in between the two layers of the hinge, cranked up the heat to the max on my forge and waited until the metal was white hot, ready to forge weld. One more very quick dusting of borax later, and I hammered it as hard as I could on the hot anvil (important!). Then, I gave it a few side strikes with the hammer to make sure the metal was not delaminating. once satisfied it would not fall apart, I refined the shape with one more heat, repeated for the other hinge, and moved on to the bottom part of the hinges.

The bottom part is L shaped to rest in a mortise on the back of the chest. It is forge welded as described above, then bent to accomodate the thickness of the carcass (about 3/4" in our case). FInally, the forge welded part is smashed into a flared out shape for aesthetic purposesand also to increase the distance between the screws.

Step 13: Hinges Part 2: Cutting and Drilling

The hinge barrel is split with a hacksaw and removal of the excess metal using an angle grinder/bench grinder/sander/files etc., then three holes are drilled and countersunk in each half of each hinge to accomodate the mounting screws.

In brief, each hinge barrel can be divided in 3 equal sections. On one half of the hinge, the middle section is removed. On the other half of the hinge, the first and last sections are removed, then everything is connected with the pin. This is how the two halves become one hinge and the movement can occur!

To attain this, I first cut the barrel on the lid half of the hinge and leave only a third of the length centered in the middle, making sure the sides are squared up with a file. I then use this to lay out the matching hole in the carcass half of the hinge, mark it and cur it out! Quite simple but hard to explain for me somehow....

Here is a video timestamp for splitting hinge barrels.

Step 14: Interlude: Home-made Beeswax Paste

I needed a wax paste to finish both the metal and the shellacked chest, so I decided to drum roll make my own, as I kept bees last summer and got some nice comb honey. Inspired by the Barefoot Forge, go check them out!

I extracted the wax by melting some comb honey, letting it cool down and decant. Once the wax had solidified on top of the honey, I separated the wax cake, washed it with water to remove remaining honey and weighed it.

I then made a 4:2:1 mixture (by weight) of wax, turpentine and jojoba oil, heated everything to melt and mix homogeneously and let it cool in a mason jar. Feels great, smells better, prevents rust!

Step 15: Hinges Part 4: Peening the Pins

The pins are riveted by cold peening with a hammer. Basically, we are mushrooming the ends until they cannot slide out of the hinge barrel any more. To make this easier, you can begin by tempering the pin: heat it up to cherry red and let it cool slowly to air. This will especially help if you use power tools to cut the pin, which can lead to work hardening of the metal on the ends.

Here is a nice video on the peening itself.

The first end is peened with the pin held in a vice, so that only that end is mushroomed. Then, the pin is inserted in the barrel, the pin is cut to final size (1/8" longer than barrel on the yet 'unpeened' side) and peened into a full rivet.


Step 16: Hinges Part 3: Finishing and Custom Screws

With the hinges forged and drilled and the barrels pinned and peened, now was time to apply a finish to them. I heated them to about 700F in the forge,quenched them in canola oil and wiped them while still hot (about 450F) with a rag generously loaded with my beeswax paste. After a fair amount of smoking and once it had cooled down, the finish was a homogeneous semi mat black water resistant coating!

I submitted small slot screws to the same treatment to remove the plating and match the hinges.

Step 17: Installing the Hinges

Installing the hinges should be a walk in the park.

Simply lay them where they'll be attached and mark then cut a mortise deep enough to allow the lid to fully close. I cut the mortise a bit shallow and increased the depth little by little with a router plane until I reached a flat lid. Then, I drilled some pilot holes for the screws in the carcass and secured the hinges. I then laid the chest on its side and propped it up to align the lid on the hinges. I marked with an awl and drilled pilot holes, and screwed the hinges in the lid for a test fit!

Step 18: Finishing and Assembling

Well, I am no finishing expert so take all of this with a grain of salt. I am happy with the results but definitely see room for improvement and could use some practice to make the whole process more straightforward and efficient...

First, I took the lid off the chest and sanded all the outside parts to 220 and then 320 grit. Then, I wiped everything with a wet rag to raise the grain, sanded to 320 again and finished with a microfiber cloth and some compressed air to remove all the dust. On this I applied a shellac finish to the outside only. I like the inside unfinished as it feels nicer when handling contents

I made a 2-pound cut shellac and applied 6 layers following the excellent tuorial by Mr Sellers. After his advice, once everything had cured and was sanded flat and level, I applied carnauba wax (unaffiliated with this company of course, I just like the product. Buy it anywhere, make your own) with 0000 steel wool. I then buffed this to a nice sheen with a fine cloth,you could use a fine bristle shoeshining brush. Look at the pictures to see the results :)


With this, thank you for taking the time to read all of this if you made it this far! Please let me know any questions in the comments and do share pictures if this has inspired or helped you to make something! Until next time :)