Looking for ideas and feedback as I finish up this design.
I don’t have a lot of space in my garage with the cars in it. The goal of this is to have a plywood cart that I can roll around and then flip forward against a wall and fold up to save space.
The blue parts will be mounted to the pink with door hinges.
These wheels (not drawn) will be used:
I’m also trying to make this cut from a single sheet. The sheet the parts are cut out of will be used for the back. This isn’t a requirement for me but it would be nice if I could pull it off.
Additionally, It might be a good idea to use a second thinner plywood piece maybe 1/4" as a spoil board. Without a solid spoil board behind your work, the dust collector has a hard time getting all the sawdust, so the areas with the holes make a mess and you may have a hard time calibrating without the board in the place where the holes are cut. I’m currently building a smaller setup and I’m very interested in using this design because it is simple. Not sure how the beam connects to it and that will matter for long term alignment to maintain calibration.
This isn’t a frame, just a storage solution for extra sheets of plywood.
The floating pieces are just rendering errors due to the unusual part nesting. The part you circled will be the red rests; that’s just where it will be cut out of the main sheet.
Got it cut over the weekend and I received plenty of plywood to test it out with.
Overall I’m happy with the base dimensions and angle. On the ground it’s quite stable and leaning against the wall works well. When it’s empty it rolls around and stores quite nicely. Under load things get quite sketchy when putting it up on the wheels…
The wheels are off center and bend the plywood quite noticeably. With the wheels at the odd angle they also don’t rotate properly making the whole setup hard to move under load.
With this much weight the wheels are also just hard to lock in place.
Add more vertical support struts to prevent bending
Second bar to lock wings?
Use normal rotating castors in the back. These will be permanently mounted ones, not the flip up ones currently used. This will reduce the offset to help with the bending.
Add large, fixed front wheels with a reliable locking mechanism to replace the front curve.
These should roll normally. Before flipping forward they will be locked in place to act like the current curve in use.
The locking mechanism must not fail or it will drop the load. I’m thinking of building a form of spoked wheel that I can lock by putting a steel bar through.
I found a simple short term fix: double up on the wheels. Now it sits and rolls without feeling like it’s going to collapse. I also found that tightening the bottom bolt so they stay up when you put them up makes the whole thing a lot easier to use.
