Parts of Shop Floor now Visible

It’s a momentous day. I finally finished my second welding cart.

Last year, I took a Harbor Freight US General tool chest and turned it into a cart. It is the greatest cart imaginable, so I decided to make a new one for my Lincoln MIG and Hypertherm plasma cutter. I believe I have written about it before.

While the pandemic was making prisoners of us all, I barely did anything, apart from getting married. Things here deteriorated. My projects languished. Over the last couple of months, I have gotten back to work, and making a new cart was a priority.

The factory-made Eastwood cart I’m replacing is great, but it has no storage apart from a couple of tiny trays and 6 tubes for MIG rods. It has no drawers. It’s also hard to move. Something about the wheels. It holds two machines, and they are both too low. It put my welder’s controls at belly-button height, and the controls on the plasma cutter were at knee level. Very inconvenient.

The cart I just made will take two 120-cubic-foot bottles, and it has a mount for what is known as a toilet paper filter. This is an air filter that uses something that looks exactly like a roll of European toilet paper for a filter.

Maybe it is toilet paper. You may be familiar with the European stuff. I wouldn’t say it’s rough, but I would guess it’s about 120 grit.

The new cart holds the filter at eye level so it’s easy to hook an air hose to it.

I have not yet made any effort to create hangers for cables and so on. I don’t think I’ll need them. Once I put a bottle on the cart, I’ll be able to drape my welding stuff on it. This sounds sloppy, but in reality, it’s extremely convenient, and it’s neater than a bunch of hooks hanging out in the way. I should be able to wrap the plasma cutter’s wiry things around the filter mount.

All the weldy things I haven’t shoved in my other chest will go in this one, so I can forget about the toolbox I’ve been keeping small items in.

If you’re wondering about those huge, neat-looking welds, you should know they’re not welds. I welded first and then molded epoxy putty around the welds. It gives a nicer look and provides the impression that I closed things up completely with weld. Using too much weld is stupid for various reasons.

It’s amazing how much space I freed up with this thing. The Eastwood cart was much smaller, but somehow it took up more space. I can almost walk around the shop now.

I really like Eastwood. They sell stuff that actually works, at modest prices. They make working on cars accessible to ordinary people. Nonetheless, my cart is better than theirs. It should be. Their cart now costs $206, I’m putting around $400 in mine.

My next similar project is a grinding cart. I bought a bigger Harbor Freight tool chest, and I’m going to put my belt grinders on it. I plan to make some kind of extension to hold grinder tool arms. They are just too bulky to go in drawers.

My old grinder cart is a two-tier plastic job from Northern Tool. It serves well for an $89 cart, but it’s open, so grinding stuff falls into the bottom tray, and it’s also sagging. Northern Tool says it will hold over 500 pounds, but I have way less than that on my top tray, and it’s bending downward in the center. The new cart will give me a place for tool arms, and I’ll be able to put belts and other junk in the drawers.

I may splurge on a KB Electronics dustproof VFD for the big belt grinder. Right now, I’m using an ordinary VFD in a fancy but inexpensive enclosure I built. It works, but the box is roughly as big as a shoebox, it’s heavy, and putting it on the new cart would make considerable fabrication necessary. A dustproof VFD could be placed on a stalk next to the grinder, mounted on the same board.

Then I would have a 3-HP VFD in a dustproof enclosure and nothing to run it with. Hmm.

A big belt grinder is pretty much indispensable if you really want to get anything done with metal.

After this, I just need air conditioning and insulation, and I’m done.