The things I learned from a Handi-Cart (Part One)

The other day I finally completed my Hand-Cart from the Weekend Workshop course. This course is a bunch of projects that help build your workshop to make it more efficient. There's some really great tips in this course and I'm glad I signed up for it. The course is currently closed but it will open again in a couple of months.

The first project I decided to build was the Hand-Cart as pictured above. It's just a little cart with three shelves that you can keep your most used tools so that they are there when you need them rather than filling up the bench. I love it but man did I screw up a few times.

The first screw up

So the plans are in metric which is good because I live in a country outside of the US (there are Imperial plans as well of course given Steve is a Yank). The problem with the plans is that he used colour coding but not well enough in my opinion. There's struts for the front which are 406mm and struts for the sides which are 469mm and he's used the same colour for both.

This ended up with me cutting the half-laps on the wrong pieces so the side struts ended up being the front and vice versa. This means the shelves ended up being the wrong size as well.

The second screw up

During the course of cutting the shelves I realised that I had cut everything to the wrong dimensions. This wasn't too much of an issue because I only needed to trim them down (if you're going to screw up make sure it's not by cutting too short). It's only after trimming that I realised I'd cut one with the grain in the wrong direction. No worries, this just ended up as the bottom shelf.

The third screw up

This is the one, that one major screwup you get in every project. The one that makes or breaks a project. I cut the cutouts for one of the shelves in... the... wrong... direction. In correcting I now have a gap in each side the thickness of the legs.

It's not a major kill though. The cutouts end up on the bottom and so aren't truly noticeable but I know they're there and I dislike it. But hey, it's a shop project and in the grand scheme of things it's not a huge deal. It's functional and that's more important to me.

For the sake of readability this article ends here and will be continued...