Legacy Cart

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Legacy Cart

In order to make the Legacy Mill more useful in my shop I built a mobile cart to set it on. The picture above shows the Legacy mounted on the cart.  There were several design considerations I wanted to take into account when I build the cart:

  • The design of the cart had to take into consideration the overall height of the tool with a 3hp+ router mounted and the Router-Raizer handle installed in it. This overall height needed to be low enough to clear three wall mounted cabinets to be built before the cart so that it would fit under them.

  • I also wanted to use the 4" castors cannibalized from another project. These two height constraints defined the overall height of the cabinet.

  • I wanted the overall length of the cabinet to be a little less than the length of the rails on the mill so that it would open space under the ends where the bed rail ends for a planned modification later.

  • I wanted the mill positioned on the cart to allow room for a reasonable sized template to be held in place without having to pull the cart away from the wall.

  • I wanted a good size section of the cart to allow space for extended depth or vertical jigs to be designed at a future date.

  • I wanted to be able to store the Legacy related tools and bits in drawers with the cart along with other items in the shop.

  • I wanted the design to be modular. This allowed me to bolt the components together. The primary reason for this was to allow the flexibility to change some element in the future without having to rebuild the entire cart.

I had originally intended to apply some turnings made on the mill to the cart itself but I've since put off that aspect, unless I get bored some day.

The cart consists of 4 modules bolted together:

  1. The platform base to which the castors are bolted to to make it mobile and attach the other pieces.

  2. Two drawer cabinets located at either end of the platform.

  3. A bulkhead between the drawer cabinets at the back edge of the cart.  This acts as a spacer and continues the "back-plane" of the two cabinet backs which significantly strengthens the cart.

The platform and bulkhead are basically torsion boxes, the drawer cabinets are simple Melamine boxes with dividers set in dado grooves. The mill is attached to the cabinets using eight 1.5" aluminum angle brackets which accept the bolts placed in the mill rails.



Legacy Cart - No drawers

This is a view of the cart before the drawers were installed.  Very simple boxes with dividers make up the drawer bays.  There are no runners used to guide the drawers, the dividers are sufficient for this.  The drawers themselves are also very simple boxes made of plywood stapled together and have a flat bottom.    The drawers were finished and coated with wax so that they would glide smoothly.  On small drawers such as this metal glides are overkill but there were two main reasons why I did not use them.   The first is that if used the drawers would tend to open when a big cart such as this is moved around.  The second reason was cost, even cheap $6/pr glides would have added $72 to the cost of the cart.

Many of the selections for materials were made to use what I had on hand at the time.

 

Cart with trays

Since nearly all flat surfaces tend to accumulate junk in my shop I planned ahead for this.  I made several trays that can be laid onto the mill rails that provide a sacrificial surface for junk to accumulate.  It is far easier to move / remove these trays when I want to use the mill than to remove individual items from the mill or cart itself.

 

Tray

 

This is a close-up view of one of the trays; nothing fancy, just a plywood bottom stapled to a pine frame.