I came across this at the San Diego County Fair,... in the wood wood working display area, I had never even heard of before... wow, lots of great stuff there!
I posted the Studley tool chest a couple times before below: http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2008/07/look-at-tools-cause-without-them.html is it posted with a couple other incredible tool collections, but now I've just found the video posted belowIn July 1988, the back cover of Fine Woodworking magazine featured an awe-inspiring unrivaled object: the vintage 19th-century tool chest of Massachusetts master carpenter piano maker Henry Studley built his magnificent tool chest over the course of a 30-year career at the Poole Piano Company.
For every tool, Studley fashioned a holder to keep it in place and to showcase it. Miniature wrenches, handmade saws, and some still unidentified piano-making tools each have intricate inlaid holders. Tiny clasps rotate out of the way so a tool can be removed. In places the clearances are so tight that the tools nearly touch.
The chest lived on the wall near his workbench, and he worked on it regularly, making changes and adding new tools as he acquired them. Using scraps from piano making ebony, mother-of-pearl, ivory, rosewood, and mahogany -- all materials used in the manufacture of pianos -- he refined the chest to the point that now, more than 80 years after his death, it remains in a class of its own.
the most incredible thing is that even though to se it open is amazing, you don't realize how much more is in store until you see on the video that what is on the surface are just racks, ans they hinge up to expose another layer below! See it on this video
Studley was well into his 80s when he retired from the piano company. Before he died in 1925, Studley gave the tool chest to a friend. That man's grandson, Peter Hardwick, loaned the chest to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and later sold it to a private collector
