This, in turn, only encourages us to continue saving, but that’s another story. This story is about a few medium-sized pieces of 5/8″ melamine I had saved, moved and saved again, along with a dirty old piece of 1/2″ melamine and a small piece of beat up plywood sheathing. This is a rare good news story when it comes to scrap wood.

Necessity: the mother of all invention

Although I moved to a different shop earlier this year, I still couldn’t figure out where my 12″ benchtop planer should live. I’ve moved it around a few times, without any clue as to where it would work best. It’s even spent some time on the floor, though picking it up is killing my back. Compared to other tiny planers, it still weighs over 70 pounds, which is too much to pick up off the shop floor regularly. Thankfully, with age comes smarts.

I’ve been trying to engineer a brilliant solution for a fancy planer cart that I could write about for the magazine and fix woodworkers’ benchtop planer storage problems across the country, but I just kept coming up short. There’s the ubiquitous rotating planer / sander cart, where the top rotates 180°, depending on what machine you want to use. There are also versions of planer carts that have extendable side wings to support your material as you plane. These solutions are out there, but I didn’t really have a desire to use any of them.

What I wanted was something really small and simple. The problem with that is there’s no award-winning article in that idea. After much consideration I finally gave in and made what I actually needed; a very simple cart to store and move a benchtop planer on. The addition of some storage underneath was nice, though I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Hmmm. Maybe I need another router, but that’s yet another story.

K.I.S.S.

Keeping it simple meant this cart almost designed itself. After measuring the planer, I started out the door to the local lumberyard. Before I got in the car it hit me that I might have something stored away that could work nicely. I went to my offcut rack to check, and bingo!

I found four random pieces of melamine particle core all about 4′ long x 16″ wide. I then noticed another piece of incredibly dusty and dirty 1/2″ material that was perfect for a back panel. The cart was going to be just under 16″ deep, about 24″ wide and 32″ high (34-1/2″ high with casters). I would have preferred it a bit deeper for stability, but 16″ was okay.

A few rips, some crosscuts, a handful of rabbets, a healthy application of glue, eight quick pins and some pressure from my clamps brought everything together in about an hour. I bought four casters for this exact project about eight months ago; glad I was thinking ahead! Once they were installed, the cart was flipped upright, the planer bolted on and I rolled it into place against my table saw to pretend to plane a board. It was going to work wonderfully. And best off all, it had absolutely no bells or whistles whatsoever. It really couldn’t have been simpler.

I designed it so it could be pressed up against my table saw when in use so it wouldn’t go anywhere if I need to apply a bit of pressure to push a heavy board through it. I made a very simple support that could sit on my table saw to keep the ends of long boards from dropping downward. Though I’m not sure right now, I’ll likely rig something up so the cart won’t move at all during use. Maybe it will be just a few short strips of wood that could be quickly and easily attached to the table saw once I’ve used it a bit.

Trying too hard

I often try to add things to projects to make them cooler, work more efficiently or just look better. It sometimes works, but it often doesn’t. Many times I should have pared the design down — removed something, as opposed to add something — to end up with the best design.

I’m sure many of us fall into the same trap, asking ourselves, “What more could I add to this design to perfect it?” This approach may pay you back with strong dividends from time to time, but just don’t forget about removing things if you’re not hitting a home run with your design. Sometimes it’s better to have less than more.

I honestly have been designing this planer cart in my mind for the past eight months. At times, it was elaborate. It was going to have some sort of mixture of hidden hinged surfaces (nearly invisible) yet super strong, supports, and cool storage devices. The list went on. In the end, I used a few pieces of scrap and spent an hour making the type of simple planer cart I needed.

The moral of this story, you ask? Well, save those scraps, obviously! You just never know when you’ll need them.