It’s pretty exciting to find this forum and a bunch of active discussions about working with hand tools. I just do small projects in my garage for fun and I find this style of working is really satisfying. Here’s a picture of my shop set-up as it is now.
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I’m making an oak wall cabinet to go over the blue cabinet that I keep my tools in. It will hold back saws, bench planes, and joinery planes. It will be about twelve inches deep, 22 inches wide, and 26 inches high. The body is out of one board that has some interesting swirling grain. I think it will look good, but it made prepping the stock more work than I expected. The grain reversed in several places in each board, so I had to take pretty fine cuts when planing them and had to re-sharpen my planes several times throughout the process.
I’ll put a frame and panel in the back, and since there will be a bit of weight I decided to set the back in a pretty deep rabbet. I used a plow plane to define the back edge of each rabbet, then tried two different approaches to remove the rest of the waste. The first one I chopped out most of the waste with a chisel, then used a block plane to clean it up. For the other three I used a ryoba saw to cut most of the waste. I then cleaned it up with a router plane. I think I preferred the second approach, but I may get myself a rabbet plane before too long.
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So, all the pieces for the case are prepped, tomorrow I’ll lay out and cut the dovetails for them. The rabbets mean that the back will have a little quirk with the layout, but I decided to do it this way instead of mitering the very back to hide them.