When you’re into woodworking in a serious way, you’re going to eventually want some power tools. With such efficiency of operation, things can go pear-shaped quickly, with wood dust getting absolutely everywhere. It’s not always practical (or desirable) to work outdoors, and many of us only have small workshops to do our making in. But woodworking tools eat space quickly. Centralized extraction is one solution, but all that fixed rigid ducting forces one to fix the tool locations, which isn’t always a good thing. Moveable tool carts are nothing new, we’ve seen many solutions over the years, but this build by [Peter Waldraff] is rather slick (video embedded below,) includes some really nice features in a very compact — and critically — moveable format.
By repurposing older cabinets, [Peter] demonstrates some real upcycling, with little going to waste and the end result looks great too! There is a centralized M-Class (we guess) dust extractor with a removable vacuum pipe which is easily removed to hook up to the smaller hand-held tools. These are hidden in a section near the flip-up planer, ready for action. An auto-start switch for the small dust extractor is wired-in to the smaller tools to add a little ease of use while reducing the likelihood of forgetting to switch it on. We’ve all done that.
For the semi-fixed larger tools, such as the miter and table saws, a separate, higher flow rate moveable dust extractor can be wheeled over and hooked up to the integrated plenum chamber, which grabs the higher volume of dust and chips produced.
A nice touch was to mount the miter saw section on sliding rails. This allows the whole assembly to slide sideways a little, giving more available width at the table saw for ripping wider sheets. With another little tweak of some latches, the whole miter section can flip over, providing even more access to the table saw, or just a small workbench! Cracking stuff!
Need some help getting good with wood, [Eric Strebel] has some great tips for you! And if you’re needs are simpler and smaller, much much smaller, here’s a finger-sized plane for you.
That may not be entirely true.
Yeah. Some (read: most) of us want power tools and come up with woodworking as an excuse to get them.
*Woodwright shop enters the chat*
Very nice! Lots of creative ideas and clever design features. It gets me thinking of ways I could improve my little shop. :-)
Brilliant!
Great stuff, nice mix of focus, utility & convenience, well done. Thanks for posting :-)
Provoked me to consider how I could “multi-use” a fixed band saw wider than its initial criteria,
Think I really need a humanoid robot to do all the setups, although I do like practicalities of building fixtures – that ends up being a static, whilst the dynamic of some humanoid robot like assist to prep/store/orient tools With built in power transfer from the robot whether battery or mains or some safe low voltage energy transfer eg slide/plug contacts etc Has me all in a tither – I marine some human like droid on mecanum wheels has limbs with all tools at disposable on soft and hard servos so no of very minimal setups needed. Yah got me going mate,
Thanks
Clever way of making a very compact tool station. I like it.
As I watched the video, I kept thinking, “uh oh, he’s going to have trouble with ____,” and then he’d reveal another hinge or slide to resolve the issue. Very well thought out. My only remaining critique is that the outfeed support for the planer could use a second slide to eliminate the wobbles.
That dust extractor is crying out to be wrapped in a set of IBM System/Z skins…