The great re-wheeling continued with a reconstruction, okay, replacement of the sander cart. Version 1 was designed for the Rikon Belt/Disc sander, but was sized kind of weirdly. I am not sure what I was thinking about when I did that. To be fair, it was made mostly with scavenged wood from the demo of the cedar closet and storage wall when I opened up my shop around the beginning of COVID.
Version 2.0 was more carefully designed, well, sized at least. There is a certain amount of design/build that went on, especially around the storage configuration. I have a Rigid oscillating spindle/belt sander, something I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and super useful for fairing curves. However, it was previously stored on a shelf underneath the old workbench and is a little heavy. As a result, I found myself not using it as often as I should. So, let’s make the new sanding cart a little bigger and mount both units on it. With a little cleverness, I can add onboard power and dust collection.
I have a Fein HEPA Turbo II unit that was seeing little use since I got the Festool sanding setup. If I took the wheels off that, it fits nicely underneath. The remaining space can be divided up into drawers for the miscellaneous plug in power tools that I find myself using less and less.
Plus this is good practice building inset doors and drawers for the inevitable future case furniture.
And so the result is show in the gallery below. Power is provided by a 12 gauge extension cord to a double gang box with 2 switches on the side of the cart. One turns on the Fein vacuum, the other energized the outlet box inside. The sanders are controlled by their normal power switches for safety’s sake. Since the uninitiated might accidentally turn on a sander by flipping the exterior switch. Also, it simplifies the wiring.
Vacuum is shared by the expedient of moving the hose between the units. It took hours to fab up a solution with the parts I had on hand or could fabricate out of PVC. Dust collection is a train wreck of an industry. All tools have it now and there are no standards between brands until you get into the 4″ and above territory. All the fittings for smaller ones are $10 and up and that’s crap. It’s $0.10 of injection molded plastic people… So, I’d love to have some permanent setup with automatic blast gates and such. But that would take hours of days of fiddling, a ton of money on parts and just isn’t worth it. It’s not like I can use both at the same time anyway.
As with the storage drawers I made for the miter saw station, the pulls are leather loops bolted to the drawer/door faces. Why? I have a ton of scrap leather from SCA armor projects, so they cost nothing and they take up zero space in a tight shop compared to traditional pulls.
One modification I need to make is a vent for the vacuum unit. If it runs more than about 10 min, things start getting toasty in there. I might even add a powered fan.
