Tool Chest Lid – Part 4

2011.08.29

A long time ago, the hinges for a tool chest would have been black iron.  You can still buy wrought iron hinges, but they are expensive.  So I attempted to turn some brass hinges black with Birchwood Casey Brass Black.  The first challenge was trying to remove the lacquer coating.  Despite soaking in lacquer thinner and scrubbing with a scotchbrite pad, I don’t think I was able to completely remove it, especially next to the knuckle.  I applied several coats of the Brass Black.  To my disappointment, the resulting black was not a deep, integral chemical change in the brass, but more of a surface coating, which would come off in streaks if I rubbed the hinge with even a paper towel.  This was not what I had in mind… I could have just painted them.  This is why I think I never really cut through all of the lacquer.  So ultimately I was unhappy with the results.  Not wanting to buy more hinges, I used sandpaper to remove as much of the black as I could.  The end result has done away with the glossy shine of the lacquer coating that comes on hinges these days, and the brass even looks a little old, a residual effect of the Brass Black.  Hm, maybe it’s really Brass “Black” instead of Brass Black, and the black is supposed to be rubbed off before it dries.

I did buy more screws, as the effort involved in trying to clean up the ones I had turned black was not worthwhile.  The hardware store where I bought the hinges has a broad assortment of screws, including the slot-head brass screws I selected to replace the phillips-head ones that came with the hinges.  (By the way, Henry F. Phillips, credited with the self-centering screw design that bears his name, was an engineer and businessman from Portland, Oregon.  The Phillips Screw Company was formed in 1934.)

At any rate, on to mortising the hinges.  Per common practice, I aligned the outer edge of the hinge leaf with the inner edge of the stile on the lid.  Then I used my marking knife to trace the narrow sides of the leaf, and a marking gauge to mark the long side.  I made a series of cross-grain chops with a chisel, and used my router plane and the chisel to create the (very) shallow mortise.  My router plane is a little cumbersome for this work, a small one would be more convenient.

To drill pilot holes for the screws, I bought one of those spring-loaded self-centering hinge bit contraptions.  It’s a neat little gizmo, but seems like the kind of thing that will break after a while.  I’m not sure I couldn’t have done as well guessing the center by eye, as even after using the self-centering bit, some of the screws ended up a little wonky.  No major disasters though, and soon enough I had all three hinges mortised and screwed on the lid.

2011.08.30

I continued with the hinges today, using essentially the same process on the chest.  I soon discovered a problem, however.  When I glued the skirt onto the lid, I laid the lid down on the dust seal lip of the chest (the back part of which the hinges will now attach to), and then glued the skirt around, sitting on the dust seal.  This left no provision for the fact that when the leaves of the hinges are parallel to each other, they are set apart about 1/8″, rather than flush as I had imagined.  So I would end up with a tilted lid as the back would sit up higher on the hinges.  I decided to make the hinge mortises in the chest deeper.  It’s not pretty like a flush-mortised hinge should be, but, oh well.  There is still a tiny gap, but not bad.

When open, the lid is supported by the back tips of the skirt.  This is not a robust long-term solution, so I will add a chain.  The front of the lid skirt ended up slightly proud of the dust seal in front.  This was not intentional, I had planned for it to be flush; however, it provides a ledge for my fingers to open the lid.

That knot in the lid is bothering me a little, I may end up fitting in a dutchman patch.  I will see what the other knots look like after painting.  Painting will come later, and the lid support chain, but for now the shell of the tool chest is complete, so it’s on to the interior.

2011.09.20

I bought a length of black-painted jack chain from Home Depot, and a couple brass pan-head screws from a hardware store.  I wanted a fairly large screw to make sure the head would hold the chain link in place, so I bought #12’s.  The shortest they had was 1″, so I drilled holes in some 1/4″ poplar and then sawed out two approximately 1/2″ x 1/2″ squares.  These slipped on between the chain and the chest, keeping the screws from poking out the other side of the 3/4″ pine.