Pallet Toolbox

In this instructable I'll be making a toolbox for my dad.

My dad has a small (still kinda cool) toolbox for his chainsaw that he made ages ago from a small existing box that he tweaked, but it was showing it's age and the handle came loose, and he has since had a few new tools that didn't fit properly any more, so I wanted to make a nice new, bigger toolbox for him. I also put this project on my website here. I first had a look around places like youtube, pinterest, and off course, Instructables for some inspiration for a cool toolbox. I found Jimmy Diresta's toolbox on youtube here which I liked, so I tried to make my own.

I started off by taking aside some nice boards from pallets I took apart earlier. For this toolbox I need 6 boards in total for the main body, plus 1 more for the handle, two smaller planks to but under the bottom and another small one as a divider inside the toolbox. I started by gluing the boards up and then measuring the end sides.

One of the reasons I went with Diresta's design is because 1. It looked bad ass, simple and durable. 2. it used dove tails, but not 100s of them all over the place. I had never done dove tails and wanted to try them, but not get stuck in doing them, so just one dove tail on each end seemed like a good idea. It was fairly straight forward. The biggest difficulty in this project was that pallet boards are not straight. They have bend and curve to them all the time. I had to wriggle and nudge to get everything to make a snug fit. It came out okay though. For the dove tails I marked about a third from each side for a dove tail, then I lined up the bottom and side pieces with the end pieces, drew outlines and cut the slots for the dove tails (much like how Diresta does in his video). Another thing that was tricky is that I have no solid workbench. I can't really use handplanes or chisels on the bench because it rocks all over the place.

Once all the pieces were cut to size, I did a dry fit, clamped some stuff, drilled some pilot holes, unclamped everything, put glue in, clamped and screwed it down. I gave it 3 layers of paint, I waited a day between each layer, so it took me 5 days before it was painted.

It turned out this toolbox was massive. Too heavy for what my dad needed, so it ends up being a stationary box in his toolshed. I have since made a smaller one which will be another instructable.