Just before Christmas last year, I started building what I’m calling a “drill press cabinet” or “drill press caddie”; I finished 2 months later. Yes, I am slow … but you wouldn’t believe everything that keeps a retired guy busy in the average week!
That said, I’m also delighted in how it turned out, so come along, find out what a drill press cabinet is, why I needed one, and how it came together!
The problem
Virtually everything I build is the result of a problem somewhere: an issue that would be resolved or improved with a little something. In this case, the problem was how to store all that stuff I was amassing around my drill press. That stuff was a couple of vises, a few clamps, a fence to align holes, and then the drill bits. Just a lot of accessories that were getting in the way in the boxes on the floor at the drill press base.
A drill press is a heavy duty drill attached to a post. The post (on floor standing models) is about 5’ tall, with the motor and drill head on top; this is offset by a weighty base to keep everything from tipping over. The drill press also has a table to hold workpieces, located about 2/3 the way up the post. I got into a detailed description here, because the geometry of the drill press contributes to the challenge of building an efficient cabinet that will sit under it. As space in my shop is at a premium, I wanted a cabinet that used the “wasted space”, which is under the drill press table, and this meant finding a way around the funky geometry I mentioned.
The build in broad strokes
I was following the plan in ShopNotes volume 22, issue 128 which breaks the build down into a few sections.
First was the base, which is simply a rectangular piece of plywood on casters and a U-shaped slot cut in the back. The casters will be taking all the weight of the cabinet, so building up the edges is required to transfer the load and keep the bottom rigid. I likely won’t be stressing my cabinet to the point that weight would ever be an issue, but the “building up the edges” bit also helps to raise the bottom of the cabinet above the drill press base that it will have to pass over.
Once you have the base completed, you assemble the front cabinet carcass, and then two side or “wing” carcasses. The front cabinet will be holding drawers, so it will remain a simple box that is placed on top and at the front of the base; the side wings were intended to have a couple of shelves, and so required an additional partition on the insides. The wing carcasses sit on either side of the U-shaped slot cut into the base and will then act to wrap around the post. At this point you could attach the cabinets to the base and move onto the top.
The top is very similar to the bottom but just a smidge larger to provide an overlap when placed on the cabinets. This piece also has a U-shaped slot cut in back, with the added feature of two recesses on top allowing you to set down a (round) drill bit and not have it roll off onto the floor.
The final step is creating the seating the drawers for the front cabinet. You could build and install these before the top but, for me, these were the last parts.
The modifications
When following a plan, life is pretty easy: you just follow the plan. However, on this build I took a couple of detours: I wanted to use some parts I had in the shop, I wanted it to look a bit better, and I wanted to save a bit of money.
The first change was the alter the wheel design. In their plan, they used thin, 3” wheels that wouldn’t turn; I wanted to re-use some casters that came off an old piece of furniture that was sitting around my shop. The casters I have are smaller in height but swivel around, much like the wheels on the bottom of an office chair. So where their wheels could be sandwiched between wooden skirts to hide them and give a sleek profile, my wheels were a bit chunkier but were also on the shelf and ready to be installed.
After a bit of fiddling in Sketchup, I came up with a plan I liked: it was easy to build, very sturdy, and would allow the casters to swivel without hitting the drill press base or extend beyond the sides of the cabinet. Clearly a superior design!
The second modification was to improve the looks and it was the change that caused the biggest delay in the project: edge banding for the exposed plywood edges. In woodworking plans, the plywood that’s most often shown is Baltic birch: a specialty plywood that is made from 15-plies of high quality wood (birch) and the panel is created without voids, knots, or other defects. It’s beautiful wood, but both rarer and very expensive. In the stores I shop, it all but disappeared from shelves after the COVID years, and the few pieces I’ve seen around town are prohibitively expensive. How expensive is that? Well, at our local hardware store, they have a 4’x4’ sheet for about $200. Yup, double-checked my decimals … two hundred smackers. And so I go with whatever I can load into my truck from the big box stores. Which is significantly lower in quality.
The biggest upshot to using lower quality plywood, is that the edges will show voids when cut. It’s not terrible, but it also doesn’t look great. The solution is simple: cover the edges. And that’s what edge banding does: you glue a thin strip of wood on top of the exposed edges, trim the overlap so you can’t tell you glued something to the edge, and you’re done! Nice. But I really didn’t think thing through before I started and so the project got out of hand. What do I mean? Here’s the rub.
After building the side boxes and front cabinet, I realized I didn’t like the look of my edges. I ran over to my scrap lumber area, found a suitably sized bit of something that wouldn’t be sufficient for another project (I think it was elm … maybe maple), and I ripped a dozen or so 2’ long strips of 3/4” wide hardwood slats on my bandsaw. The bandsaw doesn’t leave glue-ready edges, so I sanded and planed the faces that I’d be gluing to the plywood. So far, so good. Then it was time to put them on.
At this step I was SUPER inefficient, taking my time and just doing one or two sides of one cabinet at a time. With three cabinets (the front and two wings), this meant two to four gluings for each cabinet: the side(s) one day, the top and/or bottom another, and then repeat over the next few days on a different cabinet. Once that was done, I trimmed the excess with my trim router and sanded the faces to be smooth. All good. But instead of this being a week of time, I stretched it out. I’m not sure if I’m lazy, stupid … or a combination of the both, which I’ll call “retired”, but it took me way longer for this step than it should have.
And then I realized the base would also be showing plywood edges and I started in on wrapping that part! Insert a few more days of inefficient gluing, trimming, sanding.
The final modification was to the drawer installation. The plan called for using full-extension glides, which are fancy metal brackets that run on ball bearings allowing a drawer to smoothly slide in and out. They’re not super expensive, but at around $10 a pair and the plan calling for four drawers, it was more than I wanted to spend on a novelty cabinet that would sit in my shop below the drill press and ignored for most of its life. Instead, I extended the width of the bottoms of the drawers beyond the drawer side so they were just a smidge smaller than the width of the cabinet hole they were filling, then I added a hardwood rail for the bottoms to slide along on. Extending the bottoms and finding a scrap piece of wood for the rails cost me pennies. While I’m not the most frugal woodworker I know, I enjoy being economical when I can.
Drawers
This step went amazingly smoothly. Amazingly.
I’d watched a few videos where people used pocket screws, rather than traditional joinery, to make their drawers, and they all seemed happy with the results. I’m a bit of a traditional joinery bigot when it comes to woodworking, but I was taking too long on this project and needed to speed things up. And speed things up it did! Pocket holes use a jig to drill an angled hole attaching the side board into the end board, then using a special screw inserted into the pocket to pull things tight. I used four screws per side on my big drawers, three screws on the medium, and two screws on the small drawers … and everything was not only rock solid, but the drawers were perfectly square. No small accomplishment.
After this I glued the bottom plywood to the bottom edge of the drawer sides and I was ready to put this thing together!
And … as I add photos to this post, I realize that for the drawers, it wasn’t finished with slapping the bottom onto the sides. In order to present a finished appearance, a drawer front is often screwed (from inside) to the front wall of the drawer, giving a clean, unblemished appearance. After that, a drawer pull is added. I had planned to make my own but, while perusing Amazon one evening, I found cheap, metal pulls for about $1 each, and I thought that would look nice on this unit.
Assembly
I held off on attaching the cabinets to the base because I realized I had an inexplicable gap between the cabinets when putting everything in place. I fretted about this and pondered how to fix this for well over a week before I resorted to the ol’ finish carpenter’s trick of laying in a concealing strip of wood. I had enough edge banding left over that I simply took one of those strips and placed it over the gaps. Ta-da! I also had a gap at the bottom, between the base and the cabinet. It wasn’t bad, but distracting. Rather than put in a concealing strip here, I simply painted the base black and that hid any small gap.
The top went quickly but I hit a snag when I was routing out the recesses for the top pockets. The opening I was routing was just slightly bigger than my router base, which meant it could fall into the recess I was cutting, but I thought I could be smart and avoid that. Either I wasn’t smart enough or good enough, but I managed to drop the router into the recess on one of the pockets and it dug slightly deeper in one spot. Dang it! That said, a bit of sanding and then a little finish and you could hardly notice. The one thing I wish I’d done differently is to aligned the wood grain on the top side-to-side, rather than front-to-back. It’s serviceable as is but I think it would have looked just a bit more like “furniture”.
The last step was installing the rails for the drawers. I’m sure I could have done this better, but after a bunch of fiddling and re-attaching of the drawer faceplates, I got something that looked like someone who cared put this together.
Coda
For a reasonably simple project, two months is a long time to be working on it, but I’m happy with the results and now have a place for all that stuff I’d been accumulating and storing in boxes on the floor.
Thanks for looking in and seeing what we’re up to!
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