The ash chest is finished.

The ash chest is finished and here's some photos of the last stages of its construction.

The bottom boards are fitted.

The long boards are fixed with draw-bored dry pegs.

Another long board is fitted...

...and one on the other side

The top long board on the back of the chest has been left longer than the others to allow the formation of the hinge pegs

With all the boards fixed it's time to make the lid...

...starting with the two lid sides which are fitted onto the hinge pegs.

The middle board is through tenoned along its whole width

The other two boards are fitted into a groove in the lid's side boards as well as having part of their width as a through tenon.

The lid sides are shaped for decoration and to allow pegs to be fitted from above, fixing all the tenons in place.

Finally all the pegs are trimmed flush, I carved my name and date inside the lid...

...and the outside was finished with a couple of coats of beeswax polish. 

Thanks to Peter Follansbee for posting the video of the Hungarian woodworker making a riven chest which enabled me to make this one.  Also to Tamas Gyenes in Hungary who I think sent the video to Peter originally and who has been kind enough to answer a few of my emailed questions concerning details of construction.

Riven ash chest or stollen truhe.

Having watched the 1955 black and white film of a Hungarian riven chest maker at least 20 times [here's a link to it https://www.youtube.com/embed/3V0gQ9M45G8 ] I decided to have a go myself.

My ash tree was not very straight so the boards needed to be riven quite thick before hewing and draw knifing to a useable size, which meant lots of hard work on the shaving horse!

Here's a few photos showing various stages of construction:

The shaving horse is used to hold the timber while it is shaped with the draw knife

The grooving tool is used to make a groove on a side board which will receive the edge of a bottom board.

Here a leg is grooved to receive the side boards.

Four grooved legs.

Two side boards, each grooved on one edge and tapered on the other to act as tongue-and-groove joints

These pegs or trenails were riven from the ash then baked dry in my oven overnight.  Then shaped with a knife and hammered home into a draw bored mortise and tenon joint to hold the sides together.

The next step is to make the bottom boards.  Usually these chests have bottom boards which run from side-to-side.  So that I can use shorter timber I think I'll run them front-to-back [which I have seen done in a photo of one old chest]. I suppose shorter boards would be stronger too.

Ash log

I got hold of a lump of ash recently.  The tree was threatening a stone barn so its 150 year life was brought to an end.  I'm not sure what I'll end up making with it yet, maybe a riven chest  like the ones being still being made in the old tradition by Tamas Gyenes [and seen in the old 1955 video here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/3V0gQ9M45G8 ].
Anyway the first step was to rive it into moveable bits which I could get in my van and bring back to the workshop.  It didn't crack open as easily as the european beech in the video but I managed it eventually.

Grooving tool

Tamas Gyenes' grooving tool.

I saw a tool like this being used by a Hungarian woodworker in a 1950's video on Peter Follansbee's green woodworking blog:
https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/tag/riving/

I decided to try making one of the tools as I might have a go using it to make one of the riven chests still made in Hungary today by Tamas Gyenes using an age old method.

I have a blacksmith friend who has a gas forge in the back of his van who did most of the work.  We started with an old 4 pronged garden fork and removed the two middle prongs.  Next we bent the two remaining ones at 90 degrees to the handle and hammered a bevelled blade edge on the last 2 inches of their tips.

 

Then we ground the bevels flat and bent a "U" shape on each tip [over an old file].

The last inch of each blade was then heated to cherry red and doused in water to harden it.  I tempered the blades in my home oven at 230c for about 10 minutes.  I first cleaned up the steel with a bit of sandpaper so I could see as it changed to a dull straw colour, at which point it was about the right hardness to hold an edge without being too brittle.

I was amazed how well it worked and how easy it was to produce a relatively straight line, even before fitting a handle.  The slight curve of each arm relative to the handle seemed to be necessary to stop the tool juddering as it bit into the wood, lowering the angle of attack of the cutting edge.  The straight part of the blade seems to help steer the cut in a straight line as it contacts the wood just before the hooked part begins its gouging action.

I made a secondary bevel on both sides of each cutting edge to stop the blade digging in to the timber, in the same way as carving gouges are sharpened.

Finally a handle was added.

Nice to think that this tool applied to the wide edge of a riven board must be the origin of the tongue-and-groove joint still machined into timber today.