A rolling base (w/ drawer) for my Craftsman 13" planer

My planer weighs roughly a metric ton, and is a real pain to move and use on the floor. I built a ~10” tall rolling base for it so I could position it where I need it, and the whole thing tucks perfectly under one end of one of my work tables. I got a little bit fancy with the coloring, but I’m just a little tired of all the browns and yellows of shop stuff, and wanted a little splash of color in there – something that matched the planer, so I chose colors found in it. There are almost no exposed horizontal surfaces, with the top just fitting around the edge of the bolted-on planer, so it shouldn’t get obscenely dusty. Just ‘very’ :)

The sides, face frame, back, and drawer front are all 3/4” poplar. The top is 3/4” baltic birch. The drawer walls are somewhere around 1/2” ply. The drawer bottom is 1/4” hardboard. The wheels are 2.5” tall swivel casters. All of these things – including the drawer slides – were scrap, or unused parts left over from other projects. The only new things, outside of Minwax stain stuff and flat black latex paint, with which I covered the Minwax Ebony stain (looked bad), are the pull, about $7 from Home Depot, and 4 carriage bolts long enough to mount the planer to the base. It was great to spend so little on this. Joinery included rabbeted sides for the drawer walls, pocket hole screws via the Kreg K3 Master System for the carcase and face frame, and a few wood screws to hold the drawer front onto the drawer box.

My finger is in the last pic to show that it fits by about 1/2” under the long work table. That’s about as tall as I could reasonably make it. I’m excited to start using the planer again in future projects. It’s been too hard to get to for me to bother with it for too long now. It always wanted to become a surface to store things on and around. No more! I can already move around the shop with greater ease just having this one bulky item tucked out of the way. So many more shop aids left to build now.

The build is documented in this blog series.

All of the photos (a few not in the blog) are in this flickr set.

Thanks for looking!

-- Gary, Los Angeles, video game animator