Monday, January 23, 2012

Tool Chest

A little belated this, but as tool chests are "in", I sought permission from TTS to let the reader drool all over the pics of this tool chest. Well I had to suffer, so why not spread the agony around...?

Solid mahogany throughout. Solid mahogany. Oh, brother.

Luckily its already gone to enjoy a new life on the Scilly Isles, so we're all safe from temptation *dashes persp from brow in relief* And I don't care how practical it is or anything like that - just, aargh, that beading detail on the tills. J'adore. (The glazier's square is 24" long, btw; for scale)






Suggestion/deduction is it originates from a coach works at such a railway mecca as Swindon (if I recall correctly). Oral history doth speak of workers in the non-wood-related workshops slipping the artisans therein the necessary to make chests for them too. From the, um... "off cuts" and "scrap", one assumes. You've heard of the "black economy"? Was this the "mahogany economy"...

6 comments:

  1. Nice tool chest. I like the outside to inside contrast. That's a nice wow factor. Did you get to see it loaded with the tools?
    ralph

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  2. As tool chests go, that's a real cracker. And while we may rave about it, I bet the bloke who made it thought it was quite ordinary, because all his stuff was that good.

    Cheers ;-)

    Paul Chapman

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  3. Wow, proper job!

    Note the absence of a fiddle-faddle jewellery chain to support the lid, too.

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  4. Nice one. Could do with a lick of paint!

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  5. In Railway Workshop terminology that would have to be called a "foreigner" job, wouldn't it! And plenty of "foreigners" would have been built with the best scraps secreted away from the shop foreman.
    Cheers
    Mark

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  6. We have a similar looking chest made by a relative as part of his apprenticeship at the Ashford, Kent, UK railway works. The inside walls of the main carcase have pencil writing with dates from July 1910 to an examiner's note in January 1912. Inside the lid of our chest there are the same four boards mitred like a picture frame, inside that a band of light coloured wood and inside that a large panel with a raised centre and sloping gently to its four edges.

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