The toughest part here has to be the joinery: more than fifty hand-cut dovetails, all marked with dividers and cut with a backsaw, coping saw, chisels and a wooden mallet. The maker also worked with no plans at all, starting from pencil sketches and handwritten cut lists, and the whole thing took over a hundred hours. Keeping a design like that coherent without drawings seems genuinely impressive to me.
The construction reads as very deliberate. The outer frame was glued together with dovetail joints, grooves and dados came off a table saw crosscut sled and were cleaned up with a hand router plane, and board edges were squared with bench planes and a shooting board. The carcass, drawer fronts and tool mounts are African mahogany, with baltic birch behind and a maple veneer on the front panel. Brass butt hinges were knife-marked and chisel-mortised before being pre-drilled.
Plenty of small choices stand out. The three drawer fronts were cut from a single piece of mahogany so the grain runs continuously across all of them, and the drawers are through-dovetailed. Every tool sits in a recessed slot held by custom wooden blocks, magnetic holders or pegs, with more than thirty-five magnets and over a hundred brass slotted screws in total. The left door carries six wood-handled chisels and three mallets, while the right holds rules, squares, a marking gauge, calipers, dividers and marking knives. Behind the right door, a swinging panel holds a grandfather's old tools, including slide rules, as a tribute.
Two things stay open. No plans exist and only rough dimensions were shared, and one spot is saved for a plane that has not been bought yet. Screwing every tool holder down so it can come off later strikes me as a wise hedge.
Project by dk builds. Watch it on their YouTube channel: