Drawers are mounted with standard drawer slides, and the CNC setup drills the screw holes for attaching them in both the drawer sides and the case sides, to make installation simple. The extra space below the lowest drawer is so I can fill it with concrete or something to keep the center of gravity low, and to provide stability if I park something heavy on top.

The drawer construction is nonstandard, but I've used something similar for years now without any trouble. Normally you'd make a box with a separate front rather than rabbeting the sides into the front, and the bottom would sit in a groove rather than just being attached flush. But I'm optimizing for CNC construction, and glue is pretty damn strong. I used to use pocket screws for attaching drawer sides to ends, and I might still, but I'm going to see if glue and nails will work. These don't need to be super heavy-duty, and it's hard to beat the strength-to-time ratio of glue and a pneumatic nailer.

Full sheet CNC router for the win: the cabinet parts are cut. On November 3 I was about to find out whether it would go together correctly and as easily as I was hoping.

By November 15 the first iteration was nearly complete.

An assembly fixture helped a lot. It's a sheet of OSB on sawhorses with small wood blocks screwed down at intervals to locate the parts.

This might be the first time I've put drawers into something within a few months of assembling the case.

There were issues galore, mostly tolerancing, which is typical for a CNC project. But I think they're all addressable, and the end result is completely usable.

The next day: now to actually put things away. Here's one of the drawers with a 3D-printed organizer in it.

Fast, cheap… The laser cutter is still shrink-wrapped in the background, and the table is upside down, 2x4 legs sticking up from a plywood top, with a caster waiting to go on.

And good enough. Here's the laser on its finished rolling table, lid open, with the packing foam and exhaust fittings on the floor below.

I needed a 150 mm to 4" vacuum hose adapter. Oh noes, wherever will I get one? I printed it.

We built it in place in the apartment, starting with lumber laid out over some storage totes.

Then a 2x4 frame on the floor, which took some measuring.

Once the frame was done, a fit test in the bay window.

The slat boards got cut to length with a pull saw.

And then screwed down onto the frame.

Once it was assembled in the basement, I thought it would work to move the Bridgeport I'd bought, and that it should fit in my car in pieces, too. So I took it apart and checked.

It fit easily, and it was pretty easy to carry, too. Three trips on foot to carry the pieces.

Then the real test, the same day: lifting the heavy ram of a milling machine with the chain hoist. It worked perfectly.

A couple of weeks later, back in my basement shop, lifting the ram into place.

Years later, I finally found a photo of it in action, straddling a machine in a garage shop.

One piece of advice about the hardware: use a forged eye bolt rated for the load you want to lift, not an eye screw or a drawn eye bolt. One of our robots unwound a 1/4" wire eye bolt lifting itself not long ago, which is not how you want to find out.

You want the ones that look like this:

Not this:

The logo was cut on my Mostly Printed CNC router, which I set up under the deck for the job.

Here it is at work: a wider view first, then a close-up of the bit going through the wood.

Not every shape could be routed, though. For the rest, I used the CNC as a big plotter to draw the outlines on the boards, and then cut them out on either the band saw or the scroll saw. Or both.

A few days later, the cut-out pieces of the logo laid out on the round galvanized disc on the plasma table. It was coming along nicely.

Here's the sign up on the wall at the store, with the installation still underway.

And Toby and me in front of it.

I love looking at it every time I go into his Vienna store.

The face was stained light and the body and wings dark. On October 24, 2021, I had the stained piece clamped to the bench and was off to find a stain color somewhere between those two.