The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, October 01, 2016

The Ultimate Tool Cabinet

Bunny and I watched Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley, a documentary about an extraordinary tool cabinet made a century ago.

[This is the type of woodwork I would expect to see in a Gothic Cathedral, which, in its own way, this is. A Gothic Cathedral of tools.]

It's an amazing hand-crafted cabinet, managing to hold 250 tools in several ingenious layers. But in watching the tools being removed, it became clear that while beautiful, it's not the most practical of tool cabinets. It doesn't really conform to Adam Savage's “First Order of Retrievability.” I could live with having to lift up sections to gain access to the tools underneath, but there are some fiddly bits where some tools have to be removed to gain access to others.

The other downside I see to the Studley Tool Cabinet is that it's a perfect fit for the tools you see. Too perfect—any replacements have to be identical or else it won't fit into the tool cabinet. And the documentary even stated that this doesn't hold all of Mr. Studley's tools—there are some that were stored in his workbench.

Still, it's absolutely beautiful and if I had a tool cabinet, I would love to have one just as nice.

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