I bought a new smoker this spring, and after using it the first time I discovered that while it wasn’t very heavy it was very awkward to carry from the garage to the patio. Of course, being a Lumberjock, rather than being a problem – this was an excuse to head out to the workshop and build a solution!

After the problems I had getting my planer cart (LJ project link) to finish up square, I decided for this project to mill 2×4’s square and to consistent dimensions.







What I forgot to do was to also prepare some extra pieces for testing my setups – so a couple of the lap joints ended up a little dodgy. (I also learned that nibbling out the waste the way Norm does it is nowhere as easy as he makes it look…)

You can also see how I screwed up screwing the joint together – the top screw should have been like the bottom one. Oops!







Here is the main assembly complete and ready for finishing.







I really wished I’d prefinished the main pieces, as each coat required two steps. Because of how the frame had to be clamped into the Workmate I had to do all but one rail, wait for it to dry, flip it and do the rail that had been in the clamps, then wait for that to dry before doing it all again.

The cart is finished with two coats of spar varnish since it will be outdoors in all weathers. The front of the cart is exposed to meat drippings when the trays are pulled out, so it got two additional coats.







Here the wheels are being fitted – 10” wheels so it easily rolls over the grass when I forget to cut it. I used thread locking compound on all the nuts.







Four wheels on the ground! NASA couldn’t be prouder of it’s little rovers on Mars than I was at this moment… Between my injury (LJ blog link), and then June and early July being crazy busy, it has taken two months to get to this point.

The legs are powder coated sheet steel, and ‘fold under’ on the bottom to form the base of the foot. Originally I was going to bolt the smoker to the cart, but decided on toggle blocks to avoid drilling into and cracking the powder coating. While building the prototypes I found that they really didn’t work all that well, so I decided to use clamping bars running from front to back.







Here the clamping bars are being fitted. They turned out to be a bit of a bear to make as they needed to be beveled on the ends, beveled on the side against the legs, beveled on the corners where the legs bend – and have a bit nibbled out of the bottom to accommodate the foot! I know most of you guys could turn these out in your sleep (and GaryK could do so in coma, a hundred miles from his shop), but these were the most complex pieces I’ve attempted yet… And since they were mirror images I ended up getting confused with my setups and having to make three bars to get two usable ones.







Here are the bars being finished. If you click on the picture and go to the large size, the right hand one shows the portion nibbled out to accommodate the foot.







Here are the clamping bars bolted into place.







And here is the finished cart! The wheels sit outside the legs a little bit in both dimensions as there is a slight hill and bit of bumpiness between the garage (where the smoker is stored) and the patio (where the smoker is used), so the additional width and length keep the CG a bit lower and make the cart more stable overall.

The inaugural smoke will be tomorrow starting at o’dark thirty and I’ll be liveblogging it on the Smoking Meat Forums – I’ll post a link when I start the thread for those interested.

Update 07/19/2009:

Discovered a nice bonus while using the cart for the first time this morning (live thread linked in the comments), the cart raises the smoker to a much more convenient working height – no more stooping over!

While making some endgrain cutting boards, I needed a jig to help me crosscut the blank. The toggle clamps hold the blank firmly, and make the last few cuts (when there isn’t enough of the blank to hold itself square) super easy.

The rear (closer to the operator) fence is screwed and glued to the MDF base. The front fence is only screwed, so that in the future I can move it as needed to handle blanks of different width. If I were building the jig again I’d mount the front fence in some slots to allow for adjustment.

The toggle clamps really paid off on the final cut of one blank, when what was left of the blank was 1/4” too wide. Using the square to align the blank and adjusting the fence and stop block let me maximize the use of the expense and labor that had gone into assembling the blank.

Progress on improving the shop continues… This weeks project, a cart for the my planer.







Assembly of the frame begins. With a couple of sheets of MDF to protect it, the top of my table saw makes a handy assembly table.







Like a skyscraper, the frame continues to rise, but not without problems. Somewhere along the line something ended up not square (unsurprising since I was using big box dimension lumber, even carefully selected it’s far from perfect). It took quite a bit of fiddling to make everything come out as square as possible.







The completed frame – and a major error… I transferred over the dimensions of the bolt holes on the planer, and marked them on the frame before knocking off work for the day. When I came back to it the next day, I used those marks to align the inner edges of the cross pieces rather than the center line so the planer is only bolted to one crosspiece and the plywood top rather than into both crosspieces. It’s no biggie as the piece is overbuilt anyhow, but sloppy work is never good.

I didn’t take pictures of the bottom, but at one end is a pair of non swiveling wheels with two wooden support blocks under the other. The cart is stable when parked, but by picking up one end it moves easily about the shop.

A woodworking friend offered to teach an ‘Intro to Turning’ class to a (non woodworking) club we both belong to. I took him up on the offer, and yesterday turned this basic mallet. Man, turning is fun.

This is actually a project from 2007 that I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

This is the storage room for household and holiday stuff off the east end of my garage/shop. I sized the shelf spacing to hold two of the larger tubs, or three of the smaller, stacked. Not all the tubs are in place in this picture, but I went ahead and spent the big $$$ and got a enough tubs to fill the entire structure – so that in five or ten years when I need more tubs I don’t discover the SOB’s have changed sizes on me.

The shelves were built in three sections. The two end ones are identical, four legs with the frame of the shelf wrapped around and bolted to them, and then the sections were then moved into place and attached to the studs with lag bolts. The center section shelves were then cut to precisely fit between the end sections and bolted to the wall and adjacent shelves. 1/2” plywood was then laid over each section of framing.

The bottom shelf is up off the ground because the foundation wall comes up 8” from the floor, and in case the garage ever floods (which is why the uprights are pressure treated lumber). This turned out to be a wise decision as less than four months later the garage did flood during freakishly high rains. Only about 2”, but that could have been a serious problem had the lowest shelf been sitting on the floor. There should be less of a chance of this happening in the future as I’ve dug drainage trenches and will put in a proper drain system this summer for the area that ponds during very high rains.

Needless to say, today the storage room doesn’t look nearly this neat between the refrigerator, freezer, and all the stuff moved out of the garage as I convert it into a workshop.

After several weeks of screwing around, it’s finally complete…

Just a basic garage style workbench. I’m nowhere near ready to build a true woodworking bench yet.

This is the original design, with the middle shelf not shown for clarity. The front and back rails stabilize the edges of the 3/4” MDF top, the front rail is turned on its side for easier clamping of workpieces to the top.

Here are the leg pieces all precut, sorted and ready to go: from left to right – the top stretchers, the feet, and the legs.

Those playing along at home will note the parts count doesn’t match the design… When I laid the parts out on the floor I looked at the two toolboxes originally intended to go under the bench and realized that they both wouldn’t fit in a single ‘bay’ on the shelf and that putting one in each ‘bay’ would leave a space between them with an awkward post in the middle. So I changed the design in midstream and added a second middle leg to create a three ‘bay’ design, one for each toolbox and a third where I could later add drawers or a cabinet.

Here my buddy Joel assembles a leg in a jig a designed to hold the leg parts square and parallel.

I ensured the stop blocks on both the top and bottom parts of the jig were precisely positioned by clamping the base 2×4’s edge-to-edge, attaching the stop block across both bases, and then sawing through the stop blocks. The top and bottom were then aligned using a framing sqaure and clamped to my Workmate. A plywood stop was added to the top to align the top of the legs and small piece of scrap plywood was clamped to the top of one stop block to align the upper stretcher.

It took about an hour to figure out and build the jig – and fifteen minutes to build four sets of leg. Still, the time was well spent as the legs came out perfect and identical.

Here Joel is setting up the front rail for the lower shelf.

We positioned the shelf rails by cutting blocks the height of the shelf, clamping them to the legs, and then setting the rail on them and clamping the rail to the legs.

Once again those playing along at home will note the shelf is moved considerably when compared to the original design. Once the legs were up the first time, I realized the toolboxes I already had would be very awkward to get at because they had to be set back to clear the clamping area. Instead I raised to shelf so that the old recycle bins that I use as scrap bins will slide underneath. Over the next week or so I’ll build a separate toolbox stand holding them at a comfortable height and position.

No, Joel didn’t do all the work…

With the top temporarily in place, here I am notching out the shelf to fit around the legs.

Once everything was attached, we slid the bench into it’s final position and… well this picture speaks for itself:

Ok, that’s not all me… I’m blessed with a garage floor that was done right and is level with no humps that I’ve found.

The assembled bench:

Probably the only time it will be clean and clear in its lifetime…

More about assembling the bench (it was a damm good day) can be seen in my LJ blog.

I purchased a miter saw this week for working on the garage workbench (workbench V0.0) described in my shop blog… And of course a miter saw needs an appropriate stand.

I picked up a cheap desk from the local charity store, and bolted the saw to it. To support the workpiece I built a feed rail (table) from 1×4 with spacers cut from 2×4 scrap. I clamped a level to the fence, and use it to align the feed rail with the saw, the bolted the rail down.

The second picture shows an improvised stop/alignment block that lets me drop rough cut workpieces right into place, clamp them down, and then trim them to their final length.

This is the project that, as I’ll detail in my blog in a bit, has got me (back) into woodworking…

My Lady Wife mentioned that she wanted a better working surface for her polymer clay bead making than the sheets of corrugated cardboard taped together and covered in waxed paper that she had been using. (The clay leaves an oily residue and she didn’t want to crap up her workbench which is also used for other crafts.) She was thinking granite tile or Plexiglas when I recalled that I had stashed a pair of glass fish tank stand doors away. (In my mind the doors are butt ugly, more so than the pumps/tubes/cables exposed by not having doors. This has been a bone of contention between us for some years.)

The original idea was to simply glue the glass to a chunk of wood, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could improve the design. After all, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right? A couple hundred dollars in tools, parts, and materials (none of which I had to start with) later….

Cue the theme from the Six Million Dollar Man.

Using yellow glue I glued some molding from a Big Box Borg across the front so the work surface slides back across the desk and then stays firmly in place, molding from the same source is glued across the back and sits proud of the glass to prevent beads and tools from rolling off into oblivion. These moldings also serve to stiffen the 1/4” MDF base along the long dimension to help prevent flexing the (thin) glass. As another advantage, the corner molding at the front also serves as a wrist rest and presents a smooth surface to her wrists and forearms while working. To make it even more comfortable I sanded it to 180 grit before staining. The base is sealed with two coats of plain white latex as the glue used to hold the glass in place required a non porous surface and also to prevent any future liquid spills from soaking in.

Ensuring that there were no gaps between the glass and molding was a bit of challenge. I solved this by working front-to-back, gluing on the front molding then the glass, then the back molding.

I’m not really happy with the glue used to hold the glass in place though… After consulting with some woodworking friends and with the ‘associates’ at the Big Box Borg I went with Liquid Nails Mirror Cement as all the glue does is hold the glass from sliding and doesn’t really take any strain. I convinced myself the glue was white and was unpleasantly surprised when it wasn’t, I then compounded the error by applying it somewhat sloppily. If I make a second one, I’ll use a different glue system or at least apply it in a more ‘artistic’ pattern without globs and trails.

There are a couple of more flaws, some of which can be seen in the photographs, but my Lady Wife is absolutely thrilled to have a clean, smooth, and steady working surface for her bead making projects. When the sawdust settles, isn’t that what really matters?