William's Chest

I had some old reclaimed pine boards in the shop that I wanted to make something from. But the boards, which had once been the interior walls of a very old house, were chock full of small tacks. (The tacks appeared to be used to attach some sort of cloth (muslin?) to the walls before covering them with plaster or wallpaer, as there were bits of cloth trapped under some of the them.) One morning I got out my metal detector and spent a few hours finding and removing every single tack. And because the boards were split in places, I ripped the boards into usable strips then glued them back up into panels. When I was finished, there appeared to be just enough to make a chest. I cut the pieces to length and dovetailed them together by hand. In the end, I wound up scrounging every bit of scrap I could find to finish the trim. The finish is a 50/50 mix of boiled linseed oil (BLO) and terpentine, with a bit of bees wax melted in, rubbed on by hand, giving the chest a wonderul rich luster.