Computer Cart - Bucket Pod 2.0

Jay's Custom Creations is supported by Timber King Sawmills. For more information on my 1220CRZ sawmill or many other fully hydraulic sawmills, go to TimberKing.com. All right, so there's my dust collection set up. It looks janky, but when I turn the dust collector on, that tightens up a little bit. I've got bungee cords up to this pipe strapping up to the ceiling, and everything is good. It just looks like a wet noodle when dust collection is not running. All right, so I can work on the spoil board today, or I can work on getting the computer cart done so I can regain my jointer. And that's what I'm going to do today. It should take about half a sheet of MDF. I have always been a huge fan of SketchUp. Being able to design and see something in 3D space before I even make any cuts is very interesting to me, especially for like very specific engineered-ish type of projects to where we're not going for looks, we're going for function. So that's what I did in SketchUp. I put together the entire project real fast. It shouldn't take long at all to cut. It's not a complicated project. Pretty easy and straightforward. I just need a tray for the mouse and keyboard. I need a vertical space. I almost said shelf. Vertical space below to mount the computer, which is a very small computer box. Need a couple holes for pass-through for wires, and I need something more vertical above it to mount the monitor. Easy peasy. Took that design and threw it into VCarve on my machine file, so that way I can do all of my cuts with the spoil board as my built-in workspace. I'm not changing origins. Again, the whole point of the machine file is to work off of the machine's home coordinates, and you don't really have to change your origin at all. God, I love that. All right, all right, all right. Bucket pod 2.0. I like it. It's got WALL-E vibes. Think WALL-E. I don't know. Anyway, it's fun to do these little shop projects where appearance means absolutely nothing, and function means absolutely everything. So just regular three-quarter inch MDF, and I have no glue in any of this stuff because I don't know if you noticed, but I had to beat this thing together. I actually busted it up a couple times. There's a little bit of a crack right here from beating on it so hard, and then I think it's one of these braces down below. Yeah, this one's cracked a little bit right there and right there, and I'm not concerned about it at all because this is just a basic shop project, right? But it's going to do the job just fine. We have eight, if I'm not mistaken, eight screws. One, two, three, four. Eight screws connecting the shelf to the bracket to the main vertical piece, and then six screws, excuse me, six screws attaching the main vertical piece to the two vertical supports in the back, and then three self-tapping metal screws, which are actually left over from building this structure, to attach one right there, one right there, and then one right behind the monitor to attach this to the pole. Now, when I designed this in SketchUp, I put the exact spacing apart to fit this pole in the middle and then decreased it a smidgen. I don't remember what that smidgen was, but I decreased it just a little bit so that way it had to be wedged into place, and it is wedged into place. These two, almost undetectable by the eye, but are flared out just a little bit on my side so that it's a nice, nice tight wedged fit. Then, of course, the metal screws really hold it in place, and now that it's secured to the pole, I can move it around and not worry about it spinning off the pole, and this front edge stays in line with that front edge of the frame down there. So, pretty cool. The monitor mount is pretty cool, too. It's the least expensive option I could find. I think this was like five bucks on Amazon. It's just a dovetail bracket that slides down over that bracket, and I had to... Let me set this monitor up so I don't drop it. I had to space it off just a little bit. There's always one little design thing that you didn't take into consideration, and oh, man. Well, not always, but in this case, there is. So, I had to use some hex nuts to space this off. So, that way, when the monitor is hung... Oh, I'm going to see if I can do this one-handed and not see it in the back. There we go. Second try. So, that way, the power cord and the HDMI cord will have a little bit of room to come out here. I didn't take that into consideration when I designed this. So, I've got to drill another hole right here, and for that, this is a wood owl overdrive bit. Yeah, wood owl overdrive bit. These, I can't recommend them enough. They're fantastic. These cut super fast and super clean. The exit hole is just as clean as the inside hole or the enter hole. I'm going to slap some shellac on here just because I have this really old can that's probably not any good, but I'm going to use it anyway. Slap some shellac on here, and yeah, then we can move on to electrical. So, I did have to beat this thing together, which is why I didn't use glue, and that's because this MDF swelled up just a little bit. It's just stupid humid where I live. So, it swelled up, and with all of my other MDF projects, I went back and looked at my VCarve and SketchUp files for anything that I made out of MDF. I always use 0.750 as the material thickness. Now, if you really dial in the exact material thickness and use that for all of your pieces in SketchUp, then you just make all of your parts overlap. So, in SketchUp, this piece went all the way up to this edge. This bottom piece went all the way up to this edge. Then you draw your joinery and then push and pull to where it turns into box joints at edges and then mortise and tenons inside the field. And like I said, if you get the material thickness perfect from the beginning, then everything just clicks together like Legos and it's so, so satisfying. I love it. However, like I said, this swelled up a little bit, so all of my mortises here, the tenons are a little bit shallow. So, I've got a little bit of a step up onto the surface over here and here, and of course these as well, because I should have used 0.755, something like that. But for a shop project, totally fine. Just means it was a little bit harder to assemble, and I don't know if you noticed, but I beat the snot out of this thing to get it to assemble. So, electrical. I'm going to put a single receptacle right here, and that will allow me to feed my power wire through here for the computer. The computer is just a small little itty-bitty box. It's going to mount right there. And power out, plug in right here, and then the monitor, I'll drill a hole right there and then come down and power this as well. There's another hole right there on this side, and that's for my keyboard and mouse to come through this side and go into the computer. Although, I think it's just my mouse. I think my keyboard is wireless. For the electrical, I'm going to use this yellow extension cord. I've got a couple extra extension cords. This extra wire over here is just temporary extension cord to power up the air compressor, which is temporary. And the control box. The spindle box is powered by this bigger wire, and that goes to 240 right there. I already had a 240 outlet. Cool. These silver or these gray shielded wires, they're for other electrical that I have to figure out where it's going to finally end up for the jointer and the sander. But anyway, this yellow wire loops up to a 120-volt receptacle right there. I always loop my wires back behind it just to give myself a little bit of a tension break. So obviously, I have to unplug that. But it's going to stay like this, and as soon as it gets down to here, I'll piggyback onto this and zip tie it. So I'll have just one whip coming across here. This bigger wire and the yellow one will come over to here, right here somewhere. I'll have a dual gang box so I can plug in the spindle tool changer button thingy. I don't know the name of that, but the little button you press to activate the tool change. And then also the control box for the motors. Then it'll give me two extra outlets right there for whatever. Then I'll come out of it into this box, which I'll come out of it, and figure out wherever the length of my ethernet cable is. I'm going to give a little bit of support here, or a little bit of slack, and then zip tie it to the ethernet cables. And the yellow wire will go out as far as the ethernet cable will allow, and that's where I'll connect onto the cart itself. So I should have, when it's all said and done, about 10 feet of a radius off of this corner for the cart. Which is plenty enough to just get it out of the way if I'm doing some other type of work, but also plenty enough for me to work comfortably even right here in front of the machine rather than over there. I like it. I like it a lot. I even like the color of the MDF after it gets a couple coats of, well, a real thick coat of shellac on it. Just off the shelf waxed shellac. I like it. I really like it. I mounted the shelf at elbow height, so it's pretty ergonomic. The monitor is a couple inches too high. I may or may not reduce it. But my eye level is right about there. That's my eye level. So you kind of want your eye level to be a little bit towards the top of the monitor. But this isn't a station where you spend hours and hours at. Not a tremendous amount of time in any session to be honest with you. So it's okay for that to be a little bit high. Although I can remount it. Speaking of remounting it, I had to increase the number of nuts right there to four for the spacing in order to clear these wires. So it does stick forward a little bit. And when you're standing right here, you kind of sort of feel like you're a little bit too close. I can reduce that if I, what would I have to do? I would have to drill some different holes and all that. I'm not going to do that. It's okay. It is totally okay. Wire management is pretty good. It's not like super professional wire management. But you know what? That's pretty darn good. And nothing will snag. And that's the main thing. Nothing is going to snag. These wires are nice tucked away in the corner. This wire for the antenna. I forgot about this. The antenna for the pendant came with one of these little brackets and it's magnetic. So technically, well I got it tied up right there. But technically I could have just stuck it to the pole and been done with it. But that looks a little cleaner. Wire is going down. The mouse wire is the only one that's got a little bit of slack to it. But it's on the back side. Who cares? And I have the receptacle in there like so. Everything's nice and tidy. And then also all the pressure. So if this snags somewhere and all the tension is pulled on it real tight, all of that is absorbed or rather put onto this clamp right here and not the ethernet cable. Ethernet cable is loose on this side. And then zip tied all together so I only have one wire. And same with this side. If I pull on this, it's tied right in there to the box or clamped into the box. And I have a tension release loop right here. Or relief rather. So no ethernet problems should happen at all. Coming through here, I mounted a box right to the rails. I love these rails. You can just basically put anything anywhere. And this is gross. Go get it. All right. And then power comes down through here. It is zip tied to this one. And like I said, I've got one whip going that way. Real quick, this spindle requires compressed air. And hello. Watch out, Mr. Nollie boy. Watch out, buddy, buddy. And the compressor I'm currently using right here is just a little pancake compressor. It does meet the specs, but it cycles way too fast or way too often. So I need to plumb in compressed air, which I will do right there another day. But as we come through here with the wire, I decided to add a separate receptacle, a switched receptacle, rather than just plugging in right here. That was a last minute decision. Went through my electrical bin and I had everything to do this. And I have enough slack up here so that the tension doesn't want to pull this down over time. I try to take that into consideration with everything that I plug in long term. Like this is my wonderful sign, which this is great, by the way. And I try to loop these around. So if the wire's coming up from the bottom, loop it around the top. That way you don't have these being pulled down constantly all the time. Anyway, like I said, I didn't want to tie up that last outlet. So I just came off of this box with another one and put it all on a switch. So that way when I'm done, I can shut the computer down and then just flip this switch. And that will turn off both the control box as well as the spindle change doodad thingamajig. I forget the name of this thing. It's the button you push to do the pneumatic tool change. So this is also kind of like an indicator light that, well, obviously that powers on here. But I can just flip the switch and look over here and see if the switch is powered on or off. I can actually see this all the way from the family side of the shop or the living area. So I can just glance, did I leave this on or off? And if I did, I can walk over here and flip the switch and turn everything off all at once. Air compressor, real quick. Like I said, I want to plumb in for the new air compressor. And I'll piggyback the air hose off of here and up into where it needs to be. But the lens is probably going to fog up because it's so humid outside. Let's see if it does. Out here, come on doggies. The other day, actually last week, I added this receptacle and that receptacle. Right where that beam is right there on the inside is an I-beam. And right about there is where I have that extra sub panel mounted. So I just came out of there, popped a GFCI plug into that one. And came down with a couple outlets over here so that I could finally have my air compressor, my larger air compressor, on its own circuit. Other than what else I have plugged in right here. At a close power source, I'm not tripping the breaker. Because what I was doing was running the power cord through the window. Which lets cold air out, hot air in. And also spider webs all over the place. But it has to run... That particular outlet that it was plugged into goes up to the top of the window. And then all the way to the corner. And then over and then down into the electrical box. And that was just too much power draw when this thing starts up. I tripped the breaker. So finally got that situation done. Which means I can come through the wall with some pipe to plumb in good compressed air. Come on dogs. Good compressed air for the rest of the shop. But I am getting close to having one of those complete blowout and cleanup days in the shop. Because dust. Not dust from woodworking. Just dust from our property. We have a very very dusty property over there. The rest of that area is really dusty. And our prevailing wind comes from that corner. So all that dust, when it gets windy, just blows into the shop. And if it's not super hot or super cold, we leave the doors open. We prefer the doors open rather than AC air. And it's going to be a blowout and clean out the shop soon. The dust is overwhelming. Now of course the bucket pod is tethered. So I've got, I don't know, eight feet or so on either side. But that right there is a pretty good operator's location. Everything right here, as you're watching stuff happen. But also, because of the height of this, and the height of this, and the height of this, the whole cart can be pushed in place like so. Until it hits the rails or the spoil board. When I'm not using it. And that tucks away, out of the way, basically into the CNC machine. Leaving this walkway open. So that was a happy accident. I didn't plan on it being like that. But I'm totally okay with that. And also I like the monitor being into the CNC area. As I'm moving material and wood around here. I'm not going to smack into the front of the monitor on accident. If for whatever reason someone's interested in the files for this project. I'll have them available for free on my website. The whole bucket pod concept is just stinking awesome. I've had this bucket pod for almost a decade now. And it's durable. I've beat this thing up tremendously. Kicked it around, shoved it around. And the structure itself, the pole, the concrete, the five gallon bucket. The frame around it on the bottom. The casters down below. The bucket is mounted a half inch off the ground. So it rolls really easy. The whole foundation of that is incredibly solid and durable. And because it's concrete in a bottom of a bucket. Well, the center of gravity is so low. And it's incredibly difficult to tip this thing over. I remember some of the comments when I first made this. Like I said, nearly a decade ago. And people were worried about it tipping over. The center of gravity is so, so low. So whether you need to use it for a camera stand like I was using it for. Or in this case now, a computer cart. The concept of the project is really, really awesome. It just simply works. Anyway, that's it for this one. I've got to get to work on this actually. To prep the CNC for another job tomorrow morning. Which I probably won't record. It's just a basic b-carve. But things are looking good in the shop. And it feels really good to consistently be making some sawdust. Even if it is nasty, stinky MDF dust. That's it. You guys take care. I'll talk to you in the next one. I forgot to mention that the only two wires touching the ground. Are the whip going to the bucket pod. And then the whip going to the power supply. So everything else is off the ground. And I can easily sweep and clean out from underneath here. Without worrying about snagging wires. Although that one looks a little low. I may have to loop that one up a little bit higher.