Plywood and lumber cart.

Much to the dismay of my wife, my woodworking hobby resulted in our garage getting filled with plywood, wood and scraps from the different projects. One of our shelves was inaccessible since it was blocked by full sheets of plywood, and my wing chun stand became a spot for random pieces of wood to lean against. The walnut that I had were stacked under one table and was hard to sort through and the weight of everything discouraged me from moving any of it. It was time to do some organizing so I decided that I needed to build something to store both the sheet goods as well as the lumber and scraps.



Thanks to K who sacrificed two afternoons to help me with this project. We put together a sheet goods cart based on the plan in The Complete Book of Woodworking by Tom Carpenter. This design is pretty common and many examples and variations of it can be found through a Google search. I like this particular design because the cuts and assembly are pretty straight forward. Some of the nice things about this cart are:

Small foot print -- It takes up only 12 sq ft.

Mobility -- casters makes moving around easy even when fully loaded.

Holds sheet goods on one side, scrap bin on another, and full length lumber in between.

Top can be used as shelving.

The plan even had one end of the cart be a clamp carrier, but I decided not build it for now. I can always add it in the future.



Now, a few lessons learned from building this that wasn't really highlighted in the book. One, it's not easy to do this alone. It's possible but will take a lot longer. The cart is very heavy so when the author says to flip it to its side to install the caster it really takes two people.

Two, among the tools needed, I would throw in a nail gun. It helps to hold pieces in place during assembly. It's not essential, but helps a lot.

Three, have a good set of clamps handy. In the book it showed the use of just a couple of quick clamps but have some larger parallel clamps handy since wood isn't precision materials and will not just "fit". The clamps help to hold the pieces together while you screw things together.

I really enjoyed building this especially since the end result is very functional and useful. The garage is a lot less cluttered now and I can actually get access to my materials again!