Unless you only buy enough components to build one project at a time, building effects pedals eventually leads to collecting a large number of active, passive, and other components. Keeping all of these small parts organized in some meaningful way is, at best, a challenge. I've posted some photos in the past of my organization scheme for diodes, transistors, and ICs, but unfortunately I never had a great place to hang those organizers. They therefore tended to sit on the floor along with the bins for my resistors and capacitors. Given I have multiple hobbies, desk space is at a premium, and since I have also some larger electronics projects I want to work on, I needed something to give me additional work space and storage space for all of my bits. I settled on some sort of cart, and immediately went shopping. Unfortunately the closest thing I could find was a cart at Ikea which, like just about every useful piece of furniture there, was out of stock. I therefore figured since I'm already working on some insane woodworking projects with a friend, I may as well add a bespoke electronics cart to the list.
I had a few goals with this project. First, I wanted to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. My gaming table project has been running on 2+ years at this point, and though that project is in the home stretch, I really needed the cart to be done in weeks, not months. I also didn't want to spend a lot of money on wood, which if you've priced wood lately is a challenge in of itself! I ended up picking up a nice piece of birch veneer plywood at the local lumber and hardware store for about $80 - which is about twice what it would have been pre-COVID. Yikes!
The final design we settled on was three-tiered. The bottom tier would include an I-beam like structure. On three sides of it would be the drawer-pull organizers I've shown on the blog before which hold my diodes, ICs, and transistors. The larger open portion of the I would be for the tackle boxes I use for most of the hardware (potentiometers, switches, knobs, sockets, battery snaps, LEDs, etc.). As they'd be stacked, the plan was to add a piece of wood to angle the tackle boxes into the slot so they'd not be as apt to fall out when the cart was moved. The second tier would be largely open for the plastic totes I use for resistors and capacitors, and would need a lip around its circumference to keep the boxes from sliding out. The top tier would, of course, be the work surface.
We started construction with the lower tier shelf and the I-structure to divide it into four areas. For the I-structure, we used three pieces of plywood - two of which had been cut from the birch I'd picked up for this project, and one bit of leftover from my table project (as the 4' x 8' sheet of birch ply was just a little small to get the three shelves and all of the I-structure parts cut out of). We routed grooves into two pieces of wood to accommodate the central pillar of the "I" and the proceeded to tape off the wood for gluing.
As you can see from the photos above and below we taped all of the edges where the glue could squeeze out of the joins. That way the glue doesn't permeate the surface of the wood that is going to be finished later.
Once the taping was done, we glued and clamped the pieces together. This would have likely been enough, but we went ahead and used my friend's pneumatic nail gun to put some tacks into the outer pieces to make sure nothing moved as the glue dried.
While the I-structure was drying, we started trying to figure out how to get the rest of the cart together while keeping the budget at - well, essentially what I'd spent on the birch veneer plywood. Turns out my friend had some "rescue" wood he'd pulled off of another friend's burn pile, so we went and raided that to serve as edges for the shelves and the uprights holding the three shelves together.
Of course, my friend's "scrap" wood turns out to be nicer than a lot of commercial specialty wood these days. We grabbed some rough looking boards which we thought were mostly oak with maybe a teak or mahogany thrown in and proceeded to run them through the planer to get them dimensioned. It turns out there was some beautiful white and red oak and a nice length of mahogany.
We wiped the planed wood with a little denatured alcohol to bring out the grain and simulate what it would look like once a finish was applied. As it turned out, we decided that the mahogany was too nice for a cart and went with the "downgrade" option - the white and red oak.
We made a few end runners for the I-structure so that the edge plywood wouldn't be showing, and once again taped up the I-structure (now with the original tape removed). Once again we used a combination of glue and pneumatic nails to secure the end pieces on to the "I".
At this point we moved on to the shelves and began cutting and routing the edge pieces for the three shelves. The initial cut for the notch was done on the table saw. After the initial notches were cut in all of the edge pieces, we moved to the router table for final clean-up.
In the process we discovered the white oak was easier to rout than the red oak, even when going with the grain properly.
Once the long pieces were cut to match the width and length of the shelves, we began gluing the edge pieces onto the first shelf. Again, we spent a fair amount of time taping up the wood to ensure that we'd have clean lines for finishing later on.
Once the glue was set, it was time to clamp everything onto the shelf. Clamps, as always, are an absolute must for any woodworking project using wood glue, and sort of became the limiter for this part of the project as there were only so many clamps available of the right lengths at any one time (as the shelves are roughly 2' by 3' give or take a few inches).
When the glue had dried on the long side of the shelf (a few days later), we moved on to the short side using exactly the same technique. We'd notched the end trim pieces so they'd fit rather than using a 45 degree bevel in the corners.
I know this seems like quite a bit of work for a cart shelf, but there was a method to our madness. For the aforementioned gaming table I'm building, I need to make two sliding doors using much the same technique (at at roughly the same scale). The shelves of the cart therefore gave us three opportunities to figure out how we could screw up this sort of construction before we were actually working on the table itself!
Stay tuned for the second (and final) part where the cart is assembled, finished, and decked out with all manner of wonderful electronic bits!
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