02
Dec 19

Well-timed…

So this showed up at work today, making excellent time from Rutlands in the UK:

New dust collector! 100mm dust port, 1100W motor. Should do grand with the thicknesser and I’ll use the adapter that’s currently going from the existing dust deputy to let me hook the extractor up to the cyclone (100mm cyclones, it turns out, are spectacularly expensive, but I might just build a cyclone lid following this page’s instructions, which would also reduce the overall height of the stack.

Yes, I need to unscrew the joint, break the glue joint with a lump hammer and then the frame can flex the 10mm it has to so the extractor can squeeze in. It’s not great, but this wasn’t supposed to be an heirloom piece 😀 It’ll do for now. It’s not like I empty my shop vac every week anyway.

Next up, install the castors and the shelves on the cart and put things on it where they’re supposed to go so I’m sure it’ll all fit.

Right, need to extract the shop vac and retire it somewhere, then tidy up this disaster area, use a ratchet strap to secure the cyclone and its canister in the frame, and wheel it into here so it backs up against the wall and gives me a few square inches of room more than I currently have and reduces the odds of an avalanche trapping me in the shed under a few cubic feet of oak and brass stock and stringing…

There were a few other things tucked in as well, but there’s so little room in the shed while doing this (I had to screw the castors onto the cart while it balanced on the cardboard box the extractor came in, while that stood on the old cart outside the shed and the botom of the new cart poked in the door). But I did want to take a peek at this…


26
Nov 19

One down…

Two angle blocks at the base of the front legs, two metal reinforcement banding straps at the top of the front legs, and plywood panels at the back and sides and…

Calling that done. There’s no more racking, so it’s fine to use the bandsaw for light work from there, there’s more clearance for the sander’s spindle so it’s easier to get that in and out of the cart than it was on the older one, and it’s about four centimetres less deep than the last cart, which is why you can now see the corner of the vice leg on the bench…

That’s a success, though you’ll notice the plywood under the wheels there. There’s a bit of 6mm MDF on the floor at the back which keeps the timber there off the floorboards because they weren’t exactly in the best of condition, but it’s not deep enough for both the front and back wheels of the cart to be on the MDF. I’ll cut some more stable shims later.

Because next up is sorting this mess out…


25
Nov 19

Bracing

First up, cannabilising the old cart 😀

And we’ve no room in the shed so…

It knows what it did, it can stay there.

Meanwhile the new cart is not as stable under racking as I’d like given that it’s got a (sometimes running) bandsaw on it. So…

Used some left-over ash slats that hadn’t been resawn well and so wouldn’t have been used in anything else…