Back in 2007 I built a fliptop stand for my dewalt dw735 planer, and
posted a basic web page documenting some of the build. I updated this
in 2014 with a few new photos and a cool tweak to my planer. That web
page is still available right here.
For whatever reason, that continues to be one of my most-visited web
page every month -- as of Jan 2015 at least. Therefore I decided to
revisit that project and I made a video in which I gave a tour of my
fliptop stand, showing some of it's features. As well, I ended up
tearing down the stand and building in a new storage drawer in the base.
You can see all that in the video which is linked here, or see some
photo excerpts below.
Finally, as part of this process I ended up drawing up my fliptop stand
in Sketchup, to help with planning for my storage drawer. I decided to
push on with this and built it up into a detail pair of sketchup plans,
so that I could offer a full set of plans and build instructions, which
is also linked below.
PLANS FOR THIS PROJECT:
If you are interested in building your own version of this project,
I have a
set of detailed plans
available for purchase for a modest price.
Read More... »
A tour of my fliptop planer stand, which turned
into a teardown and slight rebuild.
The DeWALT dw735 is a very large planer. Most planers are more
rectangular shaped. The dewalt is shorter and more squat, but also
much more square in shape.
This means that I needed a much larger stand than I would for another
planer. I take the rough size of the planer, add a few inches for
clearance, and that gives me the rough dimension of the stand. Later
in the design process, I would lay out these dimensions on a sheet of
plywood and tweak them to get the most efficent use of the wood.
So for example, rather than 25" wide pieces, by shrinking them to
23-3/4" I still have a piece that is large enough, but also I can now
get two pieces (width-wise) out of a sheet of plywood, rather than
just one.
The handle of the planer sticks out a fair bit from the side. By
orienting the plane on the stand as shown in the photo I was able to
slightly shrink the stand. With the planer oriented like this, the
handle can just stick out over the size.
I made my stand fairly tall, because I am tall. Also, when I first
designed it, I only had one tool, so I thought I might use the flip
side as an outfeed for the tablesaw.
Underneath the stand you also need a fair bit of room, as you need
clearance for the tool to spin/flip.
The miter saw clearance...
A dust collection tip. Being a mobile stand, you can't use fixed pipe
for dust collection plumbing. But flexible hose tends to hang down
right in the middle, which would interfere with the wood feed. I
made a loop of bungie cord which I loop over the hose and oer one of
the planer posts -- indicated by the red arrows -- which nicely holds
the hose out of the way.
I don't have a fancy locking mechanism. When I built it, I had these
simple barrel bolts (sliding latches) on hand which I put on the stand
as a trial. It turned out that they work just fine and I never saw a
need for anything else. You need two bolts, mounted on opposite
corners of the stand. As well you need to drill a hole for the bolt
in the side bracing -- indicated by the red arrow.
I then started tearing down the stand. In this photo the tools have
been removed and you can see the carriage bolts that I use to hold the
tools to the fliptop.
Removing the top. The pivot mounting blocks are held in place by two
screws from the inside of the cabinet.
For many years I had a 40lb bag of sand in the bottom storage
compartment. Back when I built this stand I did my research and
pretty much every plan that I found suggested putting some weight in
the base, to help keep the center of gravity low. They were all
worried that the stand might flip over, with the high center of
gravity from having the planer spinning around. However, in all my
years of use I have never found this necessary. Since the dw735 is
such a wide/squat planer, the stand is quite wide, and therefore I
don't think there is any reasonable chance of the stand flipping over.
(In contrast, with a narrower planer, and a corresponding narrower
fliptop stand, there probably is a risk of tipping.)
So I decided that I would knock out one of the crosspieces and build a
storage drawer into the base of the stand.
I use a 1/2" diameter steel rode as an axle for the pivoting top. The
top is made from two pieces of plywood laminated together. The yellow
line in the photo indicates how the rod is inside the top.
You must have some sort of locking casters under a mobile stand.
Otherwise the whole stand can move while you are using the tool, which
could be dangerous. I really like double-locking casters, which lock
both the wheel and the pivot. However, they're also quite pricey. I
have found that I only need to lock one wheel when using the planer --
or rarely two wheels. Therefore to save money I put two cheap wheels
on the stand (indicated by the red arrow) and two double-locking
wheels (indicated by the blue arrow). This is one easy way to save
some money when building this project.
Ripping out the one lower crosspiece. I don't normally build things
to easily come apart, so I had used both glue and screws when building
this back in 2007. Therefore it was a bit messy to take apart.
For the drawer I just kept things simple. I used butt joints,
reinforced with glue and screws.
For the bottom, I glued and nailed a piece of 1/4" plywood to the
drawer bottom.
I used some surplus full-extension drawer slides for mounting the
drawer. When it comes to free/surplus stuff, you don't always get a
lot of choice. These were only about 17" long, whereas the drawer
opening was over 23" deep. I compromised and picked drawer size
somewhat inbetween those numbers.
I could now put the fliptop stand back together and remount my tools.
This is a closeup of one corner of the top, showing how the tools are
mounted. Both tools come with mounting holes. The planer is shown on
top, with a bolt through the base into the top of the stand. Over on
the right you can see the carriage bolt that goes through the top to
hold on the miter saw which is currently underneat the top. The bolts
are indicated by arrows in the photo.
I wanted to mention this, because you need to allow for the OTHER tool
when you are mounting a tool to a fliptop stand. For instance, two
of the mounting bolts for the miter saw fall UNDER the planer.
Fortunately there is enough of a gap so that the bolts do not interfer
with the planer. However it does mean that I need to mount the miter
saw first, and the planer second. As well, if I want to remove the
miter saw, then I need to first remove the planer.
Finally, here are two photos of my fliptop stand, now fully
reassembled, and showing the new storage drawer in the base.
Remember,
click this link
for information as to how you can purchase a set of plans
for building your own version of this project.
