DIY Power Tools Mobile Base

I have a small shop. 14x10 at its widest. That doesn’t allow for much room to be using a table saw or jointer and to have some sort of dust collection. With the winters we have I have not wanted to heat my 3 stall garage and my shop is located towards the back of my 3 stall garage. Just big enough to still allow a car to pull in comfortably and the shop is big enough to basically store some tools and navigate a small project around in. It is not big enough for the tools I have and to safely cut stuff on the table saw.

I have the above mentioned tools and part of the problem is that I cannot easily move the tools around to try and utilize the space that I have. I looked at different options from Rockler and Woodcraft but they were pretty expensive. I am a little handy and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment I get from building this stuff myself so I prefer this option if available and time permitting.

I first went and looked at Rockler.com and http:\\www.woodcraft.com to see what a base cost and the most reasonable one I could find was the following: http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=2383&filter=mobile%20base Which was still too much for me.

I did some google searching and found a post by Joel Wires that interested me. He has a post over at http://lumberjocks.com/ and I am going to use this for the basis for what you will see below. Here is his post: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/30738

Beings this is my first post I should have taken more pictures along the way but since I did not I am going to try and explain through text so bear with me.

Materials List:
1 – 10ft 2x4
Scrap pieces of ¾ ply
4 inch bolt
4 casters
2 wall hocks
1 small spring
4 hinges

I really had this stuff just laying around and the cost for me was simply the casters,
the spring and the small hooks. It amounted to about $13 and works very well. The most expensive part for me was buying the casters. They are not cheap. I just wanted ones that would pivot and I did not require the locking mechanism. The cheapest ones I could find were at harbor freight. They had a sale going on for a moving base for $9.99 and that had the 4 casters on it that i simply took off and used as I wanted. The longer 2x4 you see on the right has a routed slot out of the middle of it to allow it to sit over the top of the smaller 3/4x 1.5" board. There is a pretty good picture of this to the right. You will also see the spring mechanism. The next 2 pictures is how you could about activating the wheels. You simply push your foot down on the 2x4 and the wheels engage and once down far enough the triangular board you see engages over the top of the 2x4 holding it in place. It really works pretty well and was not tuff to build.

The 3/4" ply was used below each leg. This took a little tweaking as you can see with my table saw that i have metal supports running vertical to the floor. This didn't give me much room to play with so it took a little tweaking of the pivot point. You can also see the hinges and where they were used. Our home has brushed nickel hinges so i have these gold hinges laying around. They worked perfectly here and I don't mind the gold in the shop at all.

I hope this works for you and some of the explanation i mention above helps you to build your own. It really works well and was reasonable to build.