Close

Oh Snap

A project log for Shop Reorganization

Putting my house in order

david-tuckerDavid Tucker 02/25/2023 at 06:220 Comments

I have not been very active on here but I have been working on this project.  I was able to put my roof rack to the test and picked up a 3/4" sheet of mdf and a 1/8" sheet of plywood.  

I got it all loaded up ok, but I foolishly put the 1/8" plywood on top of the MDF and forgot to put a strap on the front end of the stack.  The minute I got up to 40 mph the 1/8" sheet snapped right off. Fortunately no one was behind me and I was able to circle back around and pick it up.

Going forward I will use the front strap and stack the thinnest pieces on the bottom and I think it will work out well. Once I got the front strap on it was very solidly connected to the rack.  There was no real harm done, I only picked up full sheets because they are 3x cheaper than buying 1/4 sheets, something that makes absolutely no sense.

I pulled my newly refactored carts out and used my workmate for tool storage. This worked out fairly well, I was able to use the gap between the tables to cut material and it was large enough to comfortably hold a full sized sheet without feeling sketchy.

The track saw is great, but the dust collection is not.  I suspect putting a piece of tape over the access port for removing the blade would help a lot, I need to give that a try.  I also need to experiment with ways to accurately make repeatable cuts.  Most of mine were not that bad, but two were off by 1/16" and 1/8" respectively.

I also had issues with the track rocking a bit on some cuts.  Looking at the profile off the track you can see that there is a foam anti slip strip missing on the right side, and the splitter guard is really thin, about half as thick as it should be. Both of these together let the track rock a mm or two up and down. That effects the squareness of the cut and in the case above you can see it can effect the depth of cut as well.  It looks like you can get rubber strips in various thicknesses for relatively cheap.  I'm thinking of picking up something much thicker to try and stabilize the track better.

I was able to use my biscuit jointer as well, it seemed to work very nicely. There is a small tip to the base plate that I need to shim up.  That caused a very small misalignment of the boards when putting the caraccas together. However I was able to push it back into place easily enough.  Now that I have some scrap wood to work with, it should not be too hard to clean that up.

I'm in the process of prepping the cabinet for painting, and then I need to work out how to hang it on the wall. It weighs about 50 pounds when fully loaded, so whatever I do I need a strong way to mount it.  Hopefully I will have time tomorrow to finish this all up.  This is all a bit rougher than I wanted it to be, but I can see ways to improve almost every part of the build, and that ultimately is the point of making a test project.  I'm looking forward to starting on my benches, once I have this polished up.

Discussions