Contractor Trailer Toolbox: Cutting and Assembly - 360

hey folks how you doing hopefully you're all having a great day today this is part two of a three-part series on building a contractor rolling tool box a big contractor trailer uh to take to different job sites this isn't for me this is for a friend of mine a local friend of mine who is an on-site contractor so part one of this series covered the sketchup design or how we came to this particular design part two which is this video right here we'll cover the entire assembly and cutting and assembly and then part three will be a walk through of the 100 completed ready for the maiden voyage trailer so without further ado let's rewind about a month and we'll get started with cutting and assembly this project calls for 25 sheets of plywood the majority of those are one half of an inch thick a few at three quarters of an inch thick and a few at one quarter of an inch thick 23 of the 25 sheets are cut on the cnc machine with the rest being basic table saw cuts cutting an assembly day started at 8 30 a.m and we wasted no time getting the cnc running our number one priority for the entire day was to keep the machine running we can always find something to do while the machine runs so no matter what when the machine stopped we needed to unload load and start it up again quickly ben and misty aren't familiar with the nuances of cnc design or cnc cutting so during the first sheet i made sure to let them know how the tabs work small tabs are added to the tool paths to prevent the pieces from shifting after the piece is cut this is necessary when you don't have a vacuum table on the machine to hold the material to the table as you will see later instead of removing the parts piece by piece on the machine the entire sheet is moved to the assembly table where the pieces can be removed from the waste for all 23 sheets i ran the same one quarter of an inch diameter two flute spiral down cut bit from bits and bits.com it's an astral coated bit which reduces friction and heat buildup which therefore prolongs the life of the bit all of the tool paths were set at a quarter inch depth of cut and 300 inches per minute travel while cutting the first sheet i increased the travel in mach 4 to 150 which put it at about 450 inches per minute of travel but i did forget to adjust the spindle rpm luckily we didn't see any decrease in cut quality with the increased chip load when laying out the pieces to be cut the quickest thing to do is just let the software nest the parts however i did not want pieces of each cabinet in each drawer to be spread among many sheets so i nested them manually having full control over the nesting process it slows things down a little bit on the front end but in doing so i was able to get ben and misty assembling by the end of sheet number two the assembly process is crazy simple this style of construction uses box joints for everything on edge and mortise and tenon for everything in the middle it's like putting together a set of big kid legos we started with the right wall which is the drawer wall and there are four drawer cabinets on this side with a divider system above each one of the cabinets gets two horizontal braces on top two on back and two on bottom after a few sheets we all settled into a groove and and stayed busy misty was always assembling ben was helping assemble and then also removing tabs when the new sheet came off the machine and i was helping ben with the tabs when i wasn't getting the machine going all three of us were moving and we rarely stopped we were like in a well-oiled machine and it felt really really good to be leading so much productivity it finally dawned on me that a flush trim bit and the trim router wasn't the most efficient tool for the tabs due to the high number of pieces for this particular job a much better process would be to take the part to the tool rather than the tool to the part so i set up the router table with a flush trim bit instead once the router table was set up ben and i established a little bit of a workflow where i would break down the pieces free from the waste and stack them for trimming at the router table this sped things up quite a bit after all four cabinets were assembled the drawer marathon could begin and that's exactly what it was it was a drawer marathon this design calls for 26 drawers of four different sizes one of the best takeaways from this build was the use of numbered drawers each drawer front got a number cut into it and this is it's incredibly convenient for the crew working on site after getting accustomed to the drawer layout someone can ask for a runner to go get whatever item out of whatever number drawer and immediately know where it is so since implementing this system for ben and his trailer i want to do this to all of the drawers in my shop everything that i make going forward here you can get a better idea of the construction method as i said box joints for every joint on the edges and mortise antenna joints for all of the interior connections the drawer assembly marathon continued for the rest of day one which only lasted five and a half hours due to some scheduling issues and in those five and a half hours we got all of the full sheet cnc work done we assembled all four of the right side cabinets we assembled all 26 drawers and got started on the divider system we were knocking out some serious work and it felt great day two in the shop started out with the divider system that's gonna go on top of the drawer cabinets on the right wall this is a 90 inch long cabinet with one quarter of an inch wide dadoes spaced about one and a half inches apart the dadoes are for quarter inch plywood panels to divide the space as needed from here on out there is no cnc box joints or mortise and tenon joints it's all pocket holes it's all brad nails and a lot of glue the back panel stiffens the assembly and is held in place with glue and brad nails at this point the cnc work it's done the rest of the cutting can be done with the table saw and miter saw so i was ripping strips of one quarter of an inch plywood at the table saw while ben and misty were sizing them to fit in the box at the miter saw finally the left side can begin and this side is a much more simple design it's a larger assembly but it's a more simple design that has larger item and scrap wood storage a big priority for ben was to have an organized system to store scrap wood and scrap plywood making this large of a project also made me realize a few things about my shop layout and workflow first returning to a four foot by eight foot assembly table was a great move especially for plywood based projects second i realized that i have a lot of medium sized walkways that result in less open floor space for large assemblies as much open space as i have here in the shop we had to slide the assembly table around a few times to get the left side assembly built the last piece of the puzzle was to add the floor piece to the left side assembly then we could orient it for loading into the trailer we ended up making some very specific brackets to use existing bolt holes in the left wall for securing the left side assembly and the entire right side it was just kind of set in place and temporarily strapped to the wall for the ride home this concludes the work in my shop in total we had 10 shop hours of work spread over two days the first five and a half hours of day one that was with me ben and misty and then day two four and a half hours was me ben misty and one of their employees uh chris i'm not mistaken we worked great as a team and we were very very productive part one of this build covers the sketchup design the cutting and assembly covered here is part two and part three will cover the completed and loaded trailer right before its maiden voyage so that's it for this video be sure to go to jscustomcreations.com newsletter to sign up for my email newsletter so you don't miss anything that i publish subscribe here if you want to see more videos like this take care and i'll talk to you in the next video