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April 2025
April 2025
Recently, we scored a free hutch cabinet on the side of the road. It's a nice piece, and I wanted to repurpose it to work as a "drinks" cart. In particular, I envisioned adding bottle storage to the left side of the hutch, which was already missing a shelf.
The design itself is pretty simple: two layers of a lattice structure, spaced to (1) fit most bottle sizes, and (2) fit within the hutch cabinet. Each lattice point is a half-lap joint - I thought this would look nice and be relatively easy to make.
Getting Started
Getting Started
First, I cut all my pieces to length, including the 45deg angle at both ends of each piece. Then, it was time to really get to cutting.
Each of my 20 major "stringers" needed 5 dadoes cut in, in addition to the dadoes on my smaller end pieces. That's a lot of dadoes to cut.
In order to preserve my sanity, I added a little jig onto my table saw sled to help with cutting the dadoes. Using a tab, spaced precisely from the saw blade, I could cut all my dadoes by butting the previous dado up against the tab. In this way, I only had to precisely cut the first dado on eice piece, and use the jig for the rest.
That said, it was still a lot of work. My fingers ached from gripping the sled and workpieces, but eventually, I got every piece done. I could have used a dado blade to speed up the cutting - I have an old cambering (?) dado blade, the kind that spins off-axis. But I've never used it, it doesn't work with my sled, and it scares the pants off me. I just took things slow and steady with a regular blade instead.
I originally planned on glueing the lattices together, and then screwing the two lattices together, using long standoffs to keep them separated.
However, friction spared me the extra work in both cases. My dadoes ended up fitting together so snugly that I just needed to press-fit them together (with the occasional aid of a rubber mallet). The lattices themselves were also able to support themselves against the walls of the cabinet, eliminating the need for any standoffs.
Assembly + Final Thoughts
Assembly + Final Thoughts
After a bit of polyurethane for protection, I think the addition came out wonderfully! It's very functional (okay, there's a bit of wasted space), and matches the original cabinet very well.
Cheers!
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