The Best Miter Station and Shop Cabinets
Every YouTuber will say their thing is “the best” or “ultimate” or whatever. It’s the bait to pull people in to watch their video, and I kind of have to do it too. The problem is that they usually just talk about the thing they made, and don’t go into a lot of the important details on why they did something the way they did. But “the best” is specific to the things you like to make, and how you want your personal shop to be. What is best for me may not be the best for everyone else. So I made a video discussing all the ideas I had and the reasoning for why I made certain decisions, simply for you to get an idea on what your best miter station shop cabinet design might be.
Now, I feel like I left off a few important details:
- The area under the miter station is perfect for a shop vac to act as a dust collector.
- There are upgraded miter station dust collector boots that greatly improve upon the standard dust collection, and can virtually eliminate the need to box in your miter saw due to dust containment. I bought mine from Shop Nation (although, I just bought the files and hardware, and 3d-printed them myself).
In the video I start off in jest with: “Are you a cook, or are you a woodworker?” I just want people to take a minute to think about where they spend a lot of time. A lot of woodworkers spend way more time in their shop than they do the kitchen, so take that into consideration with the quality you want to bring to the shop table. I went with CNC’ed dovetail drawers out of baltic birch plywood. I could have gone a step higher and done all hardwood, and believe me: my initial plan was to do solid wood everything from lumber that I milled myself. That didn’t go so well, but I’ll talk about that project another day.
Like everything, stuff isn’t done, and I have some ideas to bring this to the next level.
- Drawer fronts: I don’t have any yet, and I’m thinking of some awesome CNC’ed design. Maybe dragon scales! So, I talk about how people should do high quality stuff, and then leave my project unfinished. Yeah, LOL.
- Shop Vac Hose: I only have one shop vac, and I want to use it in other places. It’s kind of a pain to pull the hose on/off through the hole to the miter saw, and I’d like to do a 3d-printed magnet connection system to make this easy.
- Shop Vac Switch: Having to lean down and flip on the shop vac is a pain. I plan to either automate it (it comes on with the saw), or have a light switch on the front of the cabinet to turn it on and off without leaning down.
- Shop Vac Containment: I think it’d be nice to put the shop vac behind some cabinet doors, along with a large hole and fine filter to still allow air to exhaust.
- Flip Stop / T-Track / Tape Measure: Yeah, I have to add this at some point!
One of my goals to building this was to remove a lot of tools from the wall. I don’t think I like the french cleat tool hanging system. I have a few things it was handy for, like my hex wrenches, which I would pop on and off to bring to wherever I needed them. But other than that I found it just got in the way. So a lot of the tools are going to be in the drawers, and I plan on utilizing 3D printed Gridfinity bins and storage containers to organize them. I only recently learned about Gridfinity through my friend Ben, and I instantly got hooked. I’ve been printing up a storm, and it has really helped me organize my screw collection. I’d accidentally buy duplicate screws simply because I didn’t know I had a box buried away somewhere, and now I should be able to avoid that problem!
Another new video I did was how to glue up dovetail drawers. It seems silly, but I kind of would forget the best way to do this, and have to re-remember it after one bad glue up. So, I decided to not forget how to do it, and I pulled out a detailed video on my steps. Check it out below.
I’m still working on editing the next video which will be how I cut out my shop cabinets and assembled them. Oh yeah, also some design stuff!
As usual, I shared the CAD files for my design (free download) over on my store Corbin’s Workshop:
