Workers Of Wood

My wife has been bugging me for a while to build her a cart for the kitchen that is much lower than our counters. She's 5 nothing and is too short to mix bread dough and roll out pie dough on them. So I've gotten around to building it (almost finished) but thought it better be well braced to withstand what she'll be doing on it. All joints are floating tenons except where the braces meet. There I just installed a biscuit. There are enough joints that I thought I'd better put the frames together in sections so I glued half at a time on a piece of scrap ply. By the time I clamped the parts down with a cross brace installed there was no more way to put a square on it.

So I scratched my head for a bit and finally realized that if the ply was square I could just line the edges up with it so I clamped a straight edge 90 degrees to a factory edge and trimmed it with the router and up spiral I was using for doing the mortises. That worked perfectly. The frame is sitting upside down in the picture. Gluing the parts on top of the ply and clamping to that and the 2 bys the ply is sitting on kept everything nice an flat so that there weren't any issues when joining halves together.

Are you going to have storage inside the frame? That is going to be a stout cart..
HErb

My wife figures on getting a plastic bin that will fit in there, maybe to hold flour since that's what she'll mostly be working with on it. With her kneading bread dough and rolling out pie dough there may be some pretty strong racking forces put on the joints so I figured it needed the angle bracing too. I thought nipping the points off where they meet and butting them against each other would take some of the pressure off the glue joint. I'm heading back out to the shop in a minute to start cutting laminate to put on the shelf and the top. If my glue is still good.

Do you plan on putting it on castors or that might permit too much movement when she is working on it?
Herb

It is going on castors. Two will be locking and two fixed. The two locking ones seem to have pretty good brakes. They are a little on the large side for the size of the cart but they are soft which should also help the cart stay put and they were on sale. I got the shelf laminate on and I glued the shelf in place with West System epoxy as I didn't want any type fastener showing, not even brad nail holes. There is a 1/4" wide rabbet on the bottom of the styles and on the bottom cross members that sits on the shelf. Almost all the pressure will be down so that should be good enough.

Here are pics of the finished cart, minus the varathane which is going on now. Everything went together nicely so clamping the parts to the squared piece of plywood did the trick.

that's a work of art...
you need to keep that in the shop for a tool stand...

I used the same caster configuration on my scroll saw (2 fixed, 2 swivel/locks) and found that even locked the saw tries to pivot on the locked wheels. Not so bad if fixed wheels are on the close side with swivel wheels on the far side when using it. I decided to go with the wheels that lift and then lower onto it's legs. The wheels come with pins that allow the foot pedal to be removed.

See on Amazon... https://www.amazon.com/SPACECARE-Retrac ... ljaz10cnVl

Stick486 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 4:34 pm that's a work of art...
you need to keep that in the shop for a tool stand...

There would either be a divorce or she would stop making bread and pies. I don't like either one of those options.

Nickp wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:39 pm I used the same caster configuration on my scroll saw (2 fixed, 2 swivel/locks) and found that even locked the saw tries to pivot on the locked wheels. Not so bad if fixed wheels are on the close side with swivel wheels on the far side when using it. I decided to go with the wheels that lift and then lower onto it's legs. The wheels come with pins that allow the foot pedal to be removed.

See on Amazon... https://www.amazon.com/SPACECARE-Retrac ... ljaz10cnVl

I like those but there is another just under $30 shipping and duties and that's in your money. The swivel ones were $7.99 and the fixed were $5.99 my money. And I think it was maybe Herb that mentioned how far they stick. These stick out a bit, maybe 3". Just enough to comfortably get at the locks. I have told her to stand at the end that has the fixed castors when she's kneading or rolling dough, mainly because that end has bracing and the other doesn't but now I realize that the castors won't be sticking out on that end either which will be much safer for her. She can get tunnel vision when she's busy doing something.

This project has been planned for a while, longer than I want to have to admit to. I gave lots of thought to some kind of system that would lift the cart to move it and then drop it on legs to work on it. My best idea was a handle that as you lifted it would lever castors down and when you released it would let it down on the legs again but the cart would have needed to be bigger and maybe taller, neither of which was desirable and it definitely would have been way more complicated. I love engineering that kind of thing but there are enough jobs left to do in this life and a limited amount of time to do them so I keep reminding myself to keep it simple.

I have gone to this type to lock both the roll and swivel.
https://www.toolplanet.com/product/Stee ... ters-tires
https://www.toolplanet.com/product/Stee ... ters-tires

Herb

Good job, Chuck.
That is larger than I thought, you must have a large kitchen. Plenty of room to roll out dough there.
You can look forward to some good pastries. Yummmy
HErb