Tool Chest Floor Panel
2011.06.02
Today I crosscut, planed, and glued together two boards for the floor panel.
2011.06.04
After taking the clamps off, I cleaned up the glueline; first the glue globs with a cheap chisel, then handplanes.
A Brief History of Nails
Iron nails have been used for thousands of years. For most of their history, nails were wrought one at a time. They were usually square in section, and tapered on all four sides. In 1606 a machine was developed in England to cut nails to length from square iron bar, but the sides were still hammered to shape. In the late 1700’s, several American inventors developed more complex machines, ultimately with the ability to cut and head nails from sheets of iron (later steel). The cut sides were tapered, while the other sides were flat from the sheet. What had long been a slow and laborious process was now industrialized; a single nail-cutting machine could produce 200,000 nails per day. Around 1850 a machine was developed to produce nails from wire, but it did not really catch on until the 1880’s, when the Bessemer process made soft steel production more economical. Wire nails were even cheaper than cut nails, and completely dominated the market by 1910. Modern wire nail machines produce 500 per minute and require only minimal human supervision.
I bought cut nails from the Tremont Nail Company, which has been in business since 1819. To attach the floor panel to the sides, I used 6d (2″) cut nails. I decided to space them about 6″ apart, so I used my larger dividers to mark the locations.
Cut nails take more time and effort to use than wire nails. Like screws, they usually require a pilot hole. The wedge shape gives them greater holding power than cylindrical wire nails, but care must be taken to orient the tapered sides along the grain; if they are hammered in with the taper running across the grain, they will split the board, just like a wedge for splitting firewood.
Additional strength can be gained by angling the nails in opposite directions along the line. Only a slight tilt is necessary, I overdid it.
I hammered each nail in most of the way, then finished with a nail set. This one is a Japanese design, sold by Lee Valley. Setting nails is mostly a cosmetic issue, and wouldn’t really matter here on the bottom of the tool chest, but I didn’t want the heads to catch on anything either.
There is no provision for wood expansion and contraction, other than the nails bending back and forth, so this may have not been the best idea. However, my basement shop seems to stay pretty consistently humid all the time, so it probably won’t be an issue. Some tool chest floors are made of shiplapped boards running the other direction, and the overlapping rabbets provide some room for movement.
Main Glue-up