Building a Portable Outdoor Kitchen

 These have a wide variety of names in America, but essentially they're boxes designed for use as an outdoor kitchen. So I'll call mine POK_1, because it's the first iteration of my version.

Having seen a couple of videos I sat down and drew out my basic concept. I decided on 800mm as the overall  height, split equally between the base and the box. I thought this would give a reasonable working height. I'm 6'3", so I usually make things too high for other people. Hopefully not this time.

The end product was a little different to the drawing, but the overall dimensions didn't change at 400mm tall and deep and 600mm wide. 

All the wood, apart from a piece of 3.5mm ply was sitting around the workshop. The cabinet was made from 12mm ply and the drawers from some 9mm and 5mm ply I had lying around.

The top was glued and pinned to the sides as a butt joint, the sides were set in a rebate in the bottom panels with more glue and pins. I just thought it look a bit neater this way.

The doors were made as simple boxes, butt jointed, glued and pinned again, with a thin ply skin on the outside. My nail gun jammed and sprayed pins into the ply in random amounts, making quite the mess before I fixed it properly. As this was just a prototype I wasn't overly concerned. The biggest problem was the bow in the 12mm ply. I had to change the design to have a vertical divider to spread the top. For some reason I didn't notice the bow until after I'd glued the basic box together. Had I seen it, I'd have turned the top over and used the divider to pull it together rather than push it apart. 

Here I've assembled the box having cut grooves for the drawer runners using the table saw.

There are two fold out flaps to provide extra working space. Once the doors were made, I could move onto the base. This was made from 18mm ply using pocket hole joinery. It's designed to slip over the main box to make it more compact to carry and also to lock the doors shut.

It has a frame on which the main cabinet sits set about 6mm from the top.

It slides neatly into place and is very stable when used as the stand. I made a couple of simple drawers with finger pulls and a shelf to fi t into the right hand side. I also added a shelf to one door with a couple of retainers so anything stored there doesn't just fall out when you open the doors. The doors also act as supports for the top flaps.

Overall I'm quite pleased with the design, but it needs to be put to the test. After I'd finished it I decided to make a small table that would sit inside the top of the frame for carrying and then could be used as a small coffee table when out to keep things off the ground.