I Feel the Urge to Fabricate

When my dad and I moved to northern Florida, there were tons of expenses, and a lot of cash was tied up. I developed some pretty stingy habits. Things are different now, and I feel like God is telling me it’s okay to spend a little money and stop struggling to economize. This is why I now have a nice insulated stainless smoker instead of a shopmade creation cobbled together from things I bought at Home Depot.

I feel like I need to target my workshop. I have made a lot of compromises when I didn’t really need to.

Here’s a compromise I made: I bought a Klutch welding table for around $180. Real welding tables which are truly flat and made from thick steel start at maybe a grand. The Klutch is made from 4mm steel, and you can lift it by yourself.

I’m not knocking it. It’s an incredible deal. It will hold hundreds of pounds, it’s flat to within 1/16″ from one end to the other, and it comes with fixturing tools that actually work. I believe the original price was close to $400. Anyway, they used to put it on sale often, and it looks like they’ve slashed the price permanently. If you like welding, but you’re not a fanatic, I highly recommend this table. It works very, very well for me.

Still, it’s only 3 feet long, it does have that 1/16″ crown, the steel is not thick, and a bigger, flatter, stronger table would be easier to use. I didn’t buy it because I thought it was the perfect table. I bought it because it was cheap and I thought it would be easier to take with me if I moved.

I also bought two Eastwood welding carts on sale. Actually, I bought one on sale, it had a problem, I complained, they sent me another, I fixed the first one, they didn’t ask for it back, and now I have two. For $50 each.

These two-tiered carts are very strong. You can put 350 pounds on one. They work just fine. But they are compromise carts. They take up a huge amount of real estate, and they aren’t all that easy to move. Tool storage is not good, either. Each one has two tiny trays.

For a hundred bucks, an Eastwood cart is very nice. It’s not as nice as the $80 Harbor Freight Vulcan cart I bought later; that cart blows the Eastwood cart away. But it’s a good cart. Still, I am tired of wrestling with my cumbersome carts, and it would be nice to have some tool storage.

When you have no proper storage for your welding stuff, you leave a lot of it on your table. Then your 12-square-foot table becomes a 5-square-foot table, and your tools are always full of grit and steel filings.

Welders used to be heavy and large. That has changed with the development of inverter technology. My 200-amp Harbor Freight welder is very light, and it’s the size of a large tackle box. Because welders are small now, people are rethinking welder cart design. A lot of people are putting welders on top of tool chests and adding shelves for gas bottles. You wouldn’t want a giant welder on top of a tool chest, but a 40-pound welder is a different story.

I’m thinking I should get a couple of US General tool chests from Harbor Freight and fabricate mobile bases for them. I could add shelves for gas bottles, as well as cord holders for ground cables and al the other things that hang off welders. I could add tubes for TIG wire. I could put my clamp collection in the bottom drawer. I could put rods in another drawer. It would be stupendous.

A company called All-a-Cart jumped on the trend and started producing prefab kits you can bolt on a tool chest. Their brand is ZTFAB. The cost for the model I need? It’s $279.00. For two bent sheets of steel and a couple of other things. I’m sure it’s a great product, but a) that’s a ton of money for something that should cost half as much, and b) if I’m buying fabrication tools, shouldn’t I be fabricating things for myself?

I believe I can create a better solution for maybe $35, not including paint.

A number of people have created their own solutions, and they have put videos on Youtube. The problem with most of them is that they’re overbuilt. For example, people create heavy-duty closed frames to put under their carts. Why? Every US General tool chest already has a closed frame made from heavy tubing. It’s what the casters attach to. It can support 1,000 pounds (for the 26″ cart). Why do you need to add another complete frame?

My plan is to run two pieces of rectangular tubing under a chest, the long way, and drill holes in them for some of the caster bolts that screw into the chest. I’ll drill holes in the tubing for the bolts, and I’ll get longer bolts. I’ll attach the original casters to one end of the chest this way.

The tubing will extend a foot past the chest on the other end. I’ll put a piece of 11-gauge plate on it and weld it to the tubing. I’ll weld casters to the bottom of the tubing.

When it’s over, I’ll have a tool chest that sits an inch higher than before, on two tubes united by a piece of plate. The bottle can sit on the plate.

I’ll fabricate a bracket to attach to the cart a couple of feet up, to hold the bottle in place with chains. This will only take up part of the depth of the cart, so I can use the rest of the room for TIG wire tube racks and something to hold the air filter for my plasma cutter. Then I can put the Harbor Freight welder and the plasma cutter on top of the cart.

This is a one-day job.

I can get a second tool chest and make another cart for my Lincoln and my AlphaTIG. Then I can put the Eastwood and Harbor Freight carts on Craigslist.

Total investment for my “kits”: maybe $100. Total joy: impossible to measure.

I said I was going to stop being cheap, and then I said I was going to make my own carts in order to avoid paying ZTFAB $400 more than I have to. Okay, I’m not totally over it. But the tool chests themselves will cost me $600, so we’re looking at around $700, all told. That’s a lot more than the $200 I currently have invested in far inferior tools.

Cost for ZTFab carts: $1100+. Cost for fabricated carts: $700. Added value from ZTFab carts: $0.

I like it. It’s a plan.