I’m spending the summer ticking off a long list of “things I should have done twenty years ago.” At the top of my list (but probably not Kelly’s) was building a rolling miter saw stand with collapsible wings to hold long pieces of wood. For years I balanced lumber off the too-short metal ends of the saw. The result? Inaccurate cuts and the risk of a trip to Kaiser’s excellent Sunset Boulevard adjacent emergency room.
There’s a plethora of great designs for miter saw stands on the interwebs. I settled on one by Jim Straud in Popular Woodworking Magazine as it made use of a rolling cabinet, a plus when your shop is tiny. Our garage consists of two Model-T sized spaces encased in a concrete bunker at the bottom of the hill on which sits our house. When I’m working on a large project I roll the tools into the empty space where I park our car.
Straud’s plan has you make a cabinet. I skipped that step and reused a cabinet I picked up at my local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Note to LA and Oaklanites: the Reuse People of America shop also has as many cabinets as there are cars on the 405 at rush hour. There’s no need to make more! I had to buy a few pieces of wood to complete the project, but was able to make use of a large scrap of 3/4-inch melamine I had stacked in the corner of the garage. I added some wheels to make the cabinet mobile.
I painted the cabinet with homemade chalkboard paint so that I’ll know, at a glance, what’s in the drawers. The next step will be to add the adjustable stop. Perhaps I’ll also motorize the wings so that my miter saw stand can soar over the Los Angeles landscape like the Dude in The Big Lebowski dream sequence. Or maybe I’ll just fix the piece of wood I mounted backwards and only noticed when I took the photo for this blog post (extra points if you can find it). Then there’s the “improve my terrible handwriting” project. As Chaucer put it, “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.”
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Great project!
I was reminded of a (much simpler) project that a friend did for me. I had a 1980s stereo turntable/cassette player on a rolling cart that held 33 records in the bottom. The stereo quit long ago, but the rolling cart seemed useful. So, a friend sawed off the stereo part and created a nice rolling recycling bin for me.