Harbor Freight - Adjustable Height Heavy Duty Workstation (Item #46725) (Rating: 2)

I recently moved and had to leave behind three of my homemade rolling stands that previously housed my drill press, oscillating belt/spindle sander, and DW735 planer. Rather than building my own again, I decided to take a shot on a HF stand. It came out to around $20 after a 20% off coupon. The stand is actually fairly sturdy, even with the pressboard top and relatively thin steel legs and braces. It has no problem securely holding my ~90lb DW735.

However, it is an absolute pain to assemble, so I dropped it from my initial four to three stars. It goes without saying that the instructions are pretty useless. They don't mention that the braces are not symetrical, and need to be installed in very specific alignments or you won't be able to get the bolts in. I discovered that the hard way. They don't stress to put the pressboard shelves in at the right time (I didn't and ended up just bending the 1/8" pressboard bottom shelf into place and tossing the top one because I had no desire to disassemble the thing to get it in).

I'm all for assembling things myself, but even just fifteen minutes time from a good engineer in the design process would have yielded a much, much easier-to-assemble stand for the same cost. Simply making the braces obviously asymmetrical rather than almost-symmetrical-but-not-really would have done wonders.

I also don't like how difficult it is to get wheels on the base, so I dropped another star off the rating. There's no obvious way to do it. I ended up making a frame out of some scrap 2×3s and attaching leftover casters to that, then was left with no easy way to attach the HF stand to the base. I ended up screwing the nylon slip-on feet to the base and just dropping the stand into them, which works but is far from secure. I'll probably end up gluing the base to the feet with some epoxy next time I mix some up for something else, just to make sure the stand doesn't come out of the feet.

On the whole, I wouldn't buy the stand again. It's not particularly a bargain, especially since you can't easily attach wheels to it. It's very annoying to put together, and the shelves obviously can't hold a lot of weight. I don't expect miracles for ~$25, but I feel like even given the low price point I was disappointed. I won't be buying another for my drill press.

I feel like spending ~$25 at the ReStore I could get a used kitchen cabinet with drawers and attach a piece of plywood and casters to that. That'd make a much better drill press cart, albeit for probably $10-15 more in materials.