As my shop space evolves, I figure out new ways to move tools around or make my work flow a little smoother. For the past couple of years I have been mounting my miter saw on my router table when I wanted to use it. The router table doesn’t have any support on the Left or Right, so it wasn’t that useful. It also means that I can’t use my router table until I dismount my miter saw.
So I set out to build a new rolling cabinet for my planer….wait….wait, why the planer. I am going to move my planer off its existing rolling cart and move it to a new rolling cabinet. The wings will be added to the rolling cabinet as well. Below is a picture of my existing rolling planer cart and link to the post.
After moving my planer to a new cabinet, I will move the miter saw to the above stand.
The Plan
The cabinet is about 33″ tall and will be roughly 37-38″ tall with casters. I have had some good luck with these locking casters from Amazon. I decided to also try some drawer slides from Amazon as well, which worked out well. From past experience I buy the soft close slides. When moving the cabinet around they stay closed. I have another rolling cabinet with standard slides and they open up as the cabinet is rolling and can sometimes tip if all the drawers get opened.
Materials and Cabinet Carcass
I have quite a bit of leftover plywood from past projects, some birch, white oak and walnut veneered. So I only had to buy a few quarter sheets of plywood/MDF to complete this project.
I planned out my cut list, so I could cut all the same size pieces at once and avoid moving the table saw fence and ensure consistency. Then cut everything down to size. The only piece that was left oversized at this point is the depth of the middle divider and the back. Then I cut a bunch of dadoes and rabbets. The photo below shows the cabinet construction. The cabinet is on its side in the photo. The sides are rabbeted for the top/bottom and back. The sides also have a dado for the center divider. The top and bottom have rabbets for the back as well. When I get to this point I cut the depth of the middle divider to size and also the back.
Face Frame and Drawer Slide Mounts
As the cabinet carcass was drying, I milled up some leftover oak for the face frame. I decided to use 1/4″ dowels to join the face frame, so I cut all the pieces to width and length and started drilling holes for the dowels.
After gluing and clamping the face frame together, I clamped it onto the cabinet carcass. I like the added rigidity the face frame adds for rolling cabinets.
While the face frame was drying i cut some 1/2″ plywood to act as spacers for the drawer slides. So the drawer slides would be flush with the interior surface of the face frame. When ripping the face frame to size, I accounted for the 1/2″ plywood, so everything would line up. After the face frame dried I used a flush trim bit on the exterior of the face frame to flush it with the cabinet carcass.
Below is a video that covers the first portion of this build
Drawers
The drawers for the cabinet are made from 1/2 birch plywood and 1/4″ MDF bottoms. I made three of the drawers specifically for something. The bottom two are for my new Festool Sanders and sandpaper. The third drawer is for a drill kit I received and then some additional storage behind it. I made the top drawer to fill the unused space for small hand tools or whatever. I wanted to try my hand at a lock miter joint for these drawers and it took a while to set that up on my router table. After quite a few tries, I got it and made a drawer.
I also cut some grooves in the drawer sides to act as dividers. You can see them in the pic above and below. I screwed up the divider locatoin for the Festool containers since I didn’t account for their size when flipped open and only measured when they were closed. So that sucks.
After creating the drawers I screwed in the drawer slide and ran into a bit of an issue with the lower two drawers. They were too wide by ~1/16″. The top two were perfect, so I don’t know how I screwed that up, but I did. I took the drawers over to the router table and shaved some material off the drawer.
Door
After the drawers were complete, I moved onto the door that would conceal everything and keep dust out. The door was constructed use a frame and 1/4″ plywood panel. The frame used bridle joints and was cut on the table saw. The bridle joints were not perfect, I have a small gap where the “tenon” doesn’t fully fill the “mortise”, but it should be plenty strong. After the door came out of the clamps, I mortised a continuous hinge into the door and attached it to the face frame. Once I was pleased with the fitment of everything, I disassembled it all and got ready for sanding and finishing.
Finish
The cabinet and drawers all received a quick sand with 120 grit sandpaper and then a coat of shellac on the exterior surfaces. After the shellac was knocked down with 400 grit, I sprayed a coat of polyurethane on everything.
Finished Photos and Second Video
After everything was dry, I reassembled the drawers and door. Then I mounted the planer on top. I removed the foldable wings from my rolling cart and had to make some modifications to make them work with the new cabinet. Then I attached them to the new cabinet along with the casters and this thing was done.
