For the last two weeks I've been building cabinets for the shop, I found a design sometime ago in one of the wood magazine shop issues that allowed you to build cabinets with flip tops. In the issue they showed one where they had joined a performax with a flip top and gotten two tools out of one cabinet, Neat!!
So I bookmarked it in my collection and waited, well with the new shop being put together I took the plunge, and what you see is the result of their plans and some mods on my part.
This is the basic cabinet, the performax sits on a 3 drawer unit and is about 1/16" above the other cabinet, the trim wood is maple and the sides are MDO and MDF painted to match the shop. The cart has full locking wheels and is very easy to move, I decided that since I would be using the performax I would make this a sanding center:
Here's how you use the little sander, first you flip these little metal tabs:
Then you swing the sander over like this:
Now you swivel the tabs around to lock the top and close the door and your all set:
The beauty of this cabinet is that I get an extension for my performax and my little sander no longer needs to take up extra floor space, any jigs for the sander can go in the bottom of the fliptop and all the sandpaper and other items get stored in the drawers right where they are needed.
I added a little powerstrip to the unit so I could power everything from one plug (it also allows the cart to be mobile). I've actually built two of these, this one is for the sanders and the other is for the planer and jigsaw, but I'm thinking about making the flip top do dual duty on that one, one side for the scroll saw and the other for the binding cutter.
I liked the way these turned out so much that I'm building a much larger unit for the CNC using the same design as these, they are pretty simple to build and super strong when finished.
So if your looking for extra floor space, this could be a good option, I think the total for both cabinets was around $600 and that's with me doing a second set of flip tops because I didn't like the design of the first ones and made some changes.
Cheers
-Paul-