Dutch Tool Chests by Megan Fitzpatrick

Dutch Tool Chests by Megan Fitzpatrick, Roy Underhill (Foreword)

8-1/2” x 11”, 192 pages, 1.92 lbs

Lost Art Press, 2024

Cloth Hardcover

Printed in Tennessee on #70 matte-coated paper on a Japanese-built sheet-fed printing press. The pages are folded into signatures, sewn, glued and reinforced with fiber-based tape to create a permanent binding. Our books regularly survive floods and attacks by dogs and toddlers.

The book is designed to be used – hard – and survive more than a century of use.

Dutch Tool Chests gives you the in-depth instruction you need to build your own slant-lid tool chest – from choosing materials, to the joinery, the hardware, the interior parts that hold your tools and the paint.

At the same time, the book offers you detailed instructions on how to grow as a hand-tool woodworker. Author Megan Fitzpatrick offers a complete, clear and insanely detailed description of how to cut through-dovetails. Plus a detailed guide to cutting dados by hand. Plus rabbets, simple fielded panels, cut nails, screws, hinges and fitting chest lids. Building your own Dutch tool chest with the help of this book will make you a better hand-tool woodworker.

Dutch Tool Chests contains complete plans and cutting lists for two different sizes of this portable chest – plus additional plans for a rolling base that adds even more storage.

But the book is not just about building the exterior chest walls. Dutch Tool Chests shows you how to outfit the interior of your chest to hold chisels, marking knives and other pointy tools on the back wall. Plus saw tills and cubbies for jointer, jack and smooth planes. 

If that's not enough, Dutch Tool Chests offers a gallery of chests from 43 other makers that show modifications and additions for you to consider. You'll find ingenious ideas for using the chest's tool bay (or bays). Clever rolling bases. Oversized (or undersized) chests. Mind-blowing uses of the back of the fall front and or/underside of the lid. And other unique solutions that set them apart. 

Megan Fitzpatrick is a woodworker and the editor at Lost Art Press. She is short one dissertation of a Ph.D. in English literature (focused on early modern drama) and is the former editor of The Chronicle and Popular Woodworking Magazine. When she's not at the computer or teaching, you’ll find her building furniture or at the bar alongside Christopher Schwarz, publisher at Lost Art Press. In addition to making furniture, teaching woodworking, writing about woodworking, and editing writing about woodworking, she's restoring a circa-1905 foursquare in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood and living amidst the chaos with her cats, Olivia the Greyt and Sir Toby Belch.