About

About Stud & Stack

Tool storage, compared on the numbers the maker publishes. We have not opened any of these boxes, and this page explains what we do instead.

A reference desk with opinions, about tool chests, workbenches and workshop storage. The premise in one line: everyone else tells you a box feels solid, and we tell you it is 19-gauge, the slides are rated 120 lb a pair, and here is what that means when the drawer is full of sockets.

It is written for the enthusiast who is upgrading - somebody who already owns the tools, has outgrown a hand-me-down chest, and is about to spend somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars once and would like to get it right.

Scooter M., an enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, do the arithmetic, and publish the sources. No lab coat, no test rig, and no claim to have owned any of these boxes.

That framing is deliberate and it is the honest one. The ranking field in this category leads with credentialed bylines and testing claims - seventy-five hours of hands-on evaluation, three months with fifteen cabinets - and several of those claims are made by sites that also review vitamins and Dutch ovens. We are not going to compete by making a claim of the same kind. We compete on a method you can reproduce.

• We have not tested, opened, loaded or owned any product on this site.
• We hold no trade credentials and claim none. There is no certification behind any recommendation here.
• We have not been given a product by any manufacturer or retailer, and no page here was written in exchange for anything.
• We do not publish a numeric score for any product, because a score would imply an evaluation we did not perform.

1. 1Read the published specification on the maker's own page or the retail listing, and cite it. Every product entry links its sources.
2. 2Convert the units into comparable ones. Steel gauge into inches. Cubic inches into cubic feet. Slide ratings into working loads at the published 70-80 percent design guidance.
3. 3Show the arithmetic, so a reader can disagree with a specific step rather than with a conclusion. The methodology page has the whole of it.
4. 4Say when a figure is missing. Roughly a third of the 56-inch cabinets on Amazon publish no body gauge, and where that is true the page says Not published rather than filling in a plausible number.
5. 5Say when we earn nothing. Several of the most-searched brands in this category are single-retailer exclusives that no affiliate program reaches, and every page that mentions one says so.

Affiliate commission, from Amazon. If you buy through a link here we may earn a percentage, at no extra cost to you. That is the entire business model and the disclosure page sets it out in full, including which brands earn us nothing.

There is no sponsored content on this site, no paid placement, and no arrangement with any manufacturer. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page it affects, not in a footer.

If a number here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it in public. The editorial policy explains how corrections are handled, and the contact page is how to reach us. A site whose whole proposition is checkable numbers has to be genuinely correctable, or the proposition is decoration.

The byline

Scooter M.

An enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, convert the steel gauges, multiply out the slide ratings, and show the arithmetic. No lab coat, no test rig, no claim to have owned any of these boxes.

There is no photograph on this page. Putting a stock portrait next to a byline would be inventing a person, which is exactly the kind of thing the rest of this site exists to avoid.

Questions, corrections and disagreements about a number all go to the same place: the contact page.