Making routed panels for drawer cabinets without a router!

I wanted to do a quick post about making panels with rebates in them without using a router. You still need at least a circular saw, but if you don't have a router you can make these panels using two layers of material. 

I chose 9mm and 6mm MDF because I had some in the workshop. 12 and 6 or two pieces of 9mm would give you an 18mm thick panel which would be the standard thickness I use to build cabinets.

I cut my base layer (9mm board) to the height of the finished panel (800mm) and to the width of two panels plus a bit of waste (1200mm). The 6mm sheet was cut into 1200mm by 74mm strips. I've posted before about how I used a saw board with a circular saw to make treatable cuts.

You need to make some spacers for assembly and I made mine 14mm wide. Just cut one piece long enough to split into three. Oh and I cut a 20mm wide strip to go on the bottom of the panel as a starting point. This also allows me to use an 18mm thick base or stretcher at the bottom and it leaves a 2mm gap to the bottom runner.

It was then a matter of using the spacers to position the 6mm strip, check it for square and glue and pin it in position. Move the spacers and repeat all the way up. Before you start pinning, mark up where you are going to cut the assembled panel into two pieces. I did this on the first 6mm board. This is where you don't want to put any pins! Saw blades don't like nails or screws.

Once the glue is dry you can cut the panels to width and make your cabinet.

So why 74mm? It just so happens that the cabinets I make to go under the benches work on an 88mm spacing so 74mm with a 14mm gap gives me 88mm. Of course it doesn't work with the 800mm panels, but they were made to fit into a different bench. 

If you don't want to use that much 6mm board, you could rip it to say 20mm wide and then use a wider spacer to position it. The starting point is to work out the internal height of the cabinet and then work out how many drawers you can fit in the space. I make my drawers from 12mm material, so I use a runner width of 14mm. 

Say I was building a cabinet with internal dimensions of 722mm, and I want to have space for 6 single height drawers in it. I subtract 2mm for the clearance at the bottom of the cabinet and divide 720 by 6. The gives me 120mm for each drawer space. A 14mm space for the runner leaves 106mm for the drawer. Then it's just a matter of cutting the runners and spacer to watch those measurements. Depending on how you make the drawer, you need to leave 2mm at the top so it doesn't bind on the drawer above.

These are trays rather than drawers but the principle is the same. It's basically a box with a base that runs in the slots in the side panel. Because these slots are made with a router they're a bit deeper than 6mm, but only by a 1-2mm. By sheer chance that meant the the sides of the drawers were 9mm in from the edge, so I cut a couple of 9mm spaces so I could position the sides in from the edge and then squaring it up to the front and back, I glued and pinned the base in place. 

I might take some better photos of a drawer and see if I can explain it better, but it's essentially the same process that I used in an earlier post but without the rebates to square it all up.

Over-engineering a hinge for a boom arm

 Everyone who uses power tools to sand wood and uses some form of hose attachment  for dust collection, knows what a pain it is dragging the hose and cable across the bench. It often catches and pulls off the tool or gets twisted up. Far better to have the power and use dropping from above.

There are lots of ways to do this. My solution was to build a boom arm that swings out across the work space. I thought this would be the easiest and neatest solution, but I didn't figure with the issues I'd face with the hinge system that allows the arm to swing. The weight of the arm and hose produces quite a force on the hinge, pulling it down and away. 

I tired an ordinary butt hinge and a gate hinge, but neither worked well. I then made my own from threaded rod and 18mm ply, but that too wasn't able to support the arm as well as I wanted.

So I went for this:

This is it clamped together for a test fit. It's made from 18mm ply and rotates on a 20mm Aluminium tube shaft. The boom arm (made from 12mm and 6mm MDF in the arm of an I-beam) fits into a couple of slots.

The hope is that the central shaft and the shape of the hinge will offer better support.

I made a wall plate from more 18mm ply along with with a base and top plate for the shaft.

I bolted the whole thing together with M6 bolts. 

In order to make sure everything lined up, I used double-sided tape to assemble the hinge block with a piece of scrap where the boom would be fixed in place. I then counter-bored a 10mm hole in one side before drilling all the way through with a 7mm bit.

The 10mm hole is just the right side to allow the head of an M6 bolt to be driven in and head tight without splitting the ply. It's neater if you line the head uo with the grain, but it doesn't seem to make a big difference.

Once all the holes were drilled I separated the parts and then reassembled it with the boom arm in place and carefully drilled through the arm.

You'll see in the pictures that there are grooves. These are to take top the shape of the beam. To make it easy I added shims to the inner part of the beam so that everything clamped together nice an tightly.

The wall plate and other part of the hinge was again made from 18mm ply. This is all scrap wood I had around the place by the way.

20mm holes bored out using a spade bit and than all screws together with the bottom section glued in place but the top only screwed in to make dismantling a little easier if I every need to do that.

And there it is. It seems to work okay, although I might need to shim the wall plate because the wall in a little uneven. The hose and power cable is simply cable-tied to the arm and I can make connections as I need them. It works really well for both routing and sanding, so I'm pleased with the eventual outcome.

The new thing I didn't take into account is that the roof slopes from to back which means that long ladder you can see is lower at the from of the photo than at the back. The arm just clears the front, but had I set it 5-10mm higher wouldn't have cleared the ladder and I would have had to take it off the wall and repositioned it. 

Thankfully I got away with it, but only just!

Building a flip-top tool cart

 I've seen plenty of examples of flip-top carts and have thought about building one for a long time. I have a disc/belt sander that could do with a more permanent home and I have and simple drill press stand for my old Black and Decker Mains power drill bought back in 19879/80. I made a bigger table stand for the drill years ago, but that could do with improving.

So I did a quick drawing in Graphic of my design. I'm quite tall (1.90m) so I like my tools and benched to be a bit higher than most people. My benches are 90cm tall, so I designed this flip cart to be about the same.

The body is made from 18mm ply with space for a drawer. The top is made from two pieces of 18mm ply  separated by 25mm, the diameter of the aluminium tube on which the top rotates.

The tube was more like 26mm or the drill bit was more like 24, either way it was too tight and needed adjusting. Not easy once the initial hole had been prepared. The moral of the story being don't drill the hole until you've got the tube!

Apart from that it all came together nicely. I used 50mm bolt catches on the four corners to lock the top in place. 

In order to get them lined up I installed the catches on one face then flipped the top and added the bit that receives the the bolt on the other side. I then added the other catches using the receiving bit to set the position of the bolt.

I didn't bother with any fancy drawer slides, just waxed the bottom of the drawer itself.

The belt sander is bolted to the top. I used M6 bolts. I counter-bored from the inside just enough to be able to hammer the bolts in. The drill press was just screwed down.

The top rotates easily and it's already been put to use. There drill press was tucked away in ne corner of the bench and often had accumulated bits and pieces on it, making it a pain to get out and set up. Now four bolts, a quick spin, and it's already for use. 

More storage and workshop projects

 SoI've busy in the workshop. I usually do a few things over Christmas, but we're also in lockdown again so there are more things I can work on. Using the same approach as I did for the storage unit I built a second but this time to had trays rather than drawers in it. 

The plastic box in the bottom was replace with two more trays and then I made boxes for nuts, bolts, hinges etc. Although these units are made from MDF, they slide really easily after an application of wax to the runners and slides. 

The boxes were made from 6mm MDF and hardboard simply glued together and held in shape with some tape while the glue dried. No pins. 

I made different sizes but always in multiples of a basic square. That way they can be rearranged within the tray.

The next problem I wanted to try and solve was dust collection from tools used on the bench. Think sanders and track saw.

I watched a few videos of folk making boom arms and some using hooks, rings and string lines. All of them worked and I decided on an arm.

I thought it would be interesting to make my own I-beam from 6 & 12mm MDF that's lying around the place. 

The length was simply the longest pieces I had available, about 1200mm. Having cut some grooved using the table saw it was just a matter of glue and clamps to put it together. A bit of on-the-fly design and I had a hinge bracket and wall mount. 

A piece of hose and a power cable were simply cable tied to the arm and it was ready to go. It works quite well, although the hinge could be better. I might redesign that later. I don't have any photos of the boom arm.

I came across Woby Design and downloaded the plans for his camera mount. Working in metric measurements meant a few adjustments to drill sizes to use metric bolts rather than imperial. Plus a camera mount is a 1/4" thread, but I found a ball head mount that had two M4 threaded inserts.

My workshop is in a garage. It's about 5mx3m with a concrete floor that's cold and hard on the knees when you've been standing for a long time. I didn't want to move everything out so I laid a rubber mat-like tiled floor. I used something called Assemblemat. It's a bit soft for a workshop floor even though they say it can be used in a garage. If  have to do it again I'll use something like Duramat. 

Star decorations from oak flooring

In the run up to Christmas I came across some designs for star decorations. Using some scrap oak flooring and some scrap from a shed I built, this is what I made. There are more!

I used three basic designs. An overlap style, an open star and a smaller closed version made from the offcuts of the open design.