New storage and SCMS station

[roger wiegand]

It's been four years since we moved, and the shop has been a mess ever since. I do enough work on the shop to enable the next phase of work on the house, and then it sits until I can justify spending more time on the shop. Now that I've retired there's some more time to go around, so I decided to take on the mess of junk piled on every surface everywhere, and reclaim my bench from being the place where the SCMS ended up.

The cabinets are euro-style, made out of 3/4" plywood, the drawers are all baltic birch, drawer fronts and the countertop is prefinished maple ply. The cabinets and top are edged in cherry. My stamina failed me and I did not edge the drawer fronts in cherry as well, and just edge banded them. I suppose I can go back and do that later if I ever find myself with too much time on my hands. Drawers are all mounted on heavy duty Blum undermount full extension glides.

My old SCMS works great and is very accurate, but has lousy dust collection. I made the curved hood behind it with a piece of left over bendy ply. Still, only half the sawdust goes into the DC. Perhaps someday I will upgrade to a saw that is designed for better dust collection.

The end of the counter run turns out to be a good place to mount my bench grinder, perhaps two and a half steps from the lathe rather than just one, but still much better than the wobbly chair it's been sitting on!

In the course of this project I developed a lot of respect for the guys who build nice kitchen cabinets at a reasonable price and on a schedule! I'd never made 28 drawers in one go before, and I'm not particularly anxious to do it again.

Next phase is a week or two of sorting a 40 year accumulation of hardware and small parts into plastic bins from the Uline and thinking about how to use the wall and floor space that will open up when I get rid of the shelves that have been holding said hardware.

Oh-- one drawer has a cherry front because I came up short and was darned if I was going to make another trip to Boulter and buy another full sheet of the prefinished maple ply for one little drawer front!

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[David Falkner]

That's a great piece of shop furniture, Roger! I don't have room for anything like that but if I did I think I might copy your design. Glad you put the Cherry drawer front in the middle - us OCD types would go nuts if it was located anywhere else.

[Sam Layton]

Roger, you did an outstanding job on your cabinets. I am just about ready to build my radial arm saw station. You did exactly what I had in mind. A few questions if you don't mind. I will be doing euro-style as well. Can you share your construction techniques. Is each bank of drawers an individual cabinet, then all of the cabinets put together? There is a space between the first and last bank of drawers. What did you have in mind there? Do you have any, in progress photo's by chance that you could share?

Sam

[roger wiegand]

Thanks-- they've been decades in planning/contemplation. It's nice to finally have them. I just spent the morning reducing several hundred boxes and plastic containers of screws, nuts, bolts, and washers into two neatly organized drawers. I might actually be able to find something! (I found no fewer than six packages of half inch sheet metal screws, and I'll bet if I had needed one it would have been a trip to the hardware store!)

The cabinets are just somewhat beefed-up kitchen cabinets, the primary differences being inclusion of a 3/4" back and top, and thicker ply used to make the drawers. The backs didn't need to be that heavy, but I thought I might use drawer slides that screw into the backs and wanted sufficient wood there. As it turns out the slides I used attach only to the sides.

I built each cabinet separately, as a plain almost-cube. More than one would have been way to heavy for me to horse around on my own. The sides went together with lock rabbet joints made on the tablesaw, the backs are set into a rabbet as well. The backs are also 3/4" plywood and I depended on them to ensure the cabinets were square. I did not build a foot/toekick into the cabinets, as I was setting them where they straddle a 5" difference in floor height, between the old barn floor over the stable in the back and the new floor I installed in the front. The cabinets rest on the floor in the back and on a support platform in the front.

The drawers were also built using lock rabbet joints. I've had very good luck with them in plywood before. I used 3/8 BB for the bottoms and 5/8 BB for the sides, gluing the bottoms in place. I figured some of these drawers were going to be loaded quite heavily. I probably cut the drawer joints a tad tight on the tolerances, some of them required more persuasion than I like to go together. I think the plywood might have swelled a little bit with the glue-- joints that went together nicely dry didn't when the glue was on. (That's a rule, right?)

There are spaces at each end where I put cabinets on each side of the posts that hold the hayloft up. I'm awaiting inspiration for what to do with them. My wife suggests inserting art. We'll see. I might also just fill the holes if they bother me. Maybe a good spot for a fire extinguisher.

The cabinets are 24 and 18 inches wide, I've already figured out that I should have made one set at least 30 if not 36" wide. I have an irritating number of things that are just a little too long to fit.

I found a nice, free plywood optimization program that was extremely useful at http://www.optimalon.com/cutter/User/Login

I only seem to have one in-progress picture:
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[James Gunning]

I just saw a photo of a SCMS station with a backstop similar to yours. I think it was on Sawmill Creek, but I'm not sure. This guy had placed strips of clear plastic, similar to what you would see at a car wash hanging from the top front. They closed off the area behind the saw and moved with it if a miter cut was necessary. I'm sure it doesn't get every speck of dust with the SCMS, but I bet it traps a lot of it so it can be sucked up by the DC system.

[Sam Layton]

Thanks Roger, I appreciate all of the information. Hopefully first of next week I will start my radial arm saw station. In the past, I have always built face frame cabinets out of plywood. This time I will build them euro-style out of melamine. Wow, that is a lot of drawers... It will sure give you a lot of storage. I am thinking that I may make a couple with pull out shelves as well. Thanks for the optimization program, I will give it a try.

I also have boxes and boxes of stuff waiting to be unpacked and put into drawers.

Thanks again Roger, you sure did an outstanding job.

Sam

[Deb Malloy]

Awesome job. It looks great.