Make a Six Board Chest - Part 4

Wow, some time has passed since I worked on this project! To pick up where we left of it’s time to do a dry fit and fine tune things if required.

The timber has moved a bit but the housings and rebates allow the straightening of the boards. The rebates needed some fine tuning to allow the best fit. I used a simple wooden rebate plane to do this.

Once satisfied the fit was good it was onto drilling pilot holes for the nails. I must strongly recommend doing a trial nail on scrap before you start unleashing pilot holes on your work. I’m lucky to have a huge stock of old nails to hand and found a suitable pilot bit. Even though I’m going to punch the nails below the surface to allow stopping and painting I gave into OCD and set out the nails with equal spacing. Avoid the temptation to bring nails too close to the edge of your work, if you do, you risk splitting the wood.

Before things are nailed up I clean up the inside faces, I used a handplane. Also, if you have a lock or catch now is the time to chop out the recess, it’s so much easier to do it now rather than waiting until the whole thing is nailed together.

This is a glue free carcase, truth be told you could most likely add some if you wished but I’m going dry. As I stress in the video, please don’t rush, with no glue you have all the time in the world to make sure things go were they are supposed to. Before any nailing takes plane I drilled pilot hoses to prevent splitting. Also, at the top of the chest I add a small, shallow pilot hole to prevent the top edge of the board from busting out.

If you choose to use traditional nails make sure the nail heads line up with the grain, otherwise you have a high chance of the wood splitting.

Drive the nails in and punch below the surface. Then it’s a case of cleaning and levelling the outer faces. Next step is to make and attach the shaped plinth. Should be fun as I get to break out the moulding planes!