Lathe cabinet

I am starting wood worker with many hand me down tools, my father in law gave me a Central Machinery lathe a while back, I have taken serveral newbie attempts to turn some practice pieces. I needed a place to mount it and I had two end pannel assemblies from the Double-Duty Tablesaw Workbench that were mistakes and recycled them for this project. I used the same lift mechinisim from the Workbench, used some drawers that were given to me to size the width of the cabinet, luckly they were wide enough to fit the lathe. I did encounter one issue with the drawers, I picked out 3 drawers to go into the cabinet, not paying much attention, two of them were wider then the 3rd one. Sad thing was I had 4th the same width as the other two. The result was I went back into my stock and was able to find one more drawer the same width and so for the 3rd drawer (as per my design) I ended up making my first drawer. I stole the runners (nice Blum ones) from other drawers. I wrapped the frame in 1/4” birch ply

The top is made from a biscut/glue joined 2×4’s on the flat, a piece of 1/2” wide “Ikea” wood (laminated particle board) and a piece of 3/4’ birch ply. I wrapped all of that in red oak for trim I know it doesn’t match the birch ply that I started it with. I got nice deal on red oak shorts, I know use red oak like it is pine 2×4’s. After I get this all together my neighbor came over and suggested that I laminate the top. I thought that would be awesome but I would of saved the baltic birch ply for some other project! Anyhow he came over one evening and taught me the art of lamination. I turned out so awesome that I have been putting off mounting the lathe as I now use it as a roll around cart and an infeed table for cutting large sheets of ply. It is not the exact height of my TS so it will be come my lathe cart after all and I am going to convert my RAS tool box into this purpose here in the future.

While I was at it I decided to add a place for my starter set of lathe tools and came up with the solution in the drawer. I just cut a 2×4 in half and then cut slots on one of various widths to fit the blades and the other to fit the handles. I left some room for future growth.

The cabinet is not perfect by any means, it is not quite square and the miters on the trim do not line up as a result. Squareness is a major challenge for me and is a skill I am working on improving.

The handles are from Ikea and come in a four pack of a $1.99 the only problem is that the screws they come with will not come go thru 1/2” and 3/4” ply and I have been unable to find metric length screws but the standard SAE will eaisly cross thread and work just as well.

-- //FC - Round Rock, TX - "Experience is what you get just after you need it"