Just Too Old...

I guess that's me.  

For years, I've relied on a simple CAD tool I downloaded a few years ago.  It's called CadStd Lite - yes, it's Freeware.  That old thing.  

I do not do any sort of professional design.  I do not do anything that requires full-up 3D modeling.  Primarily because when I think of the things I'm going to make, I think of them as 2D views on graph paper.  Which means anything I make that's rather complex takes up more than a few sheets.

The thing I absolutely love about CadStd is it works like my brain does.  I can define the grid as some specific measurement, and design on that.  In most of my projects, 1/4" is plenty of detail for me.  Some do require I go to 1/8", while a very few have required more detail.  But it does it.

The trick is that it's a simple program.  I can draw shapes, which in my mind are 3/4" plywood sheets, 3/4" hardwood, or maybe a 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" post here and there, or ... well, you get the idea.  In my head, I have an inventory of lumber I can go to the store and buy.  I can pick up 2x2s, 2x3s, 2x4s, plywood from 1/4" to 3/4" thick, and I've got the tools to make it all smaller.  Most of the time, with a fair amount of accuracy.

What I really would love is a basic CAD tool that worked like my brain does.  A selection of pre-defined lumber items, which I could then adjust to size, and add them to the item I'm designing.  At the moment, I've got four projects open in CadSTD - I can run multiple instances, which works well the way my mind does, as in "oh, hey, I should think about a..."  Right now I've got a design for a fold-down lightweight work table that I'd use in the garage and driveway, a new dresser for my wife which I would make out of combined plywood and hardwood, no MDF, so it lasts more than a few years, a portable camp stove table made out of steel pipe, and a camp kitchen.

The first design is very well suited to 2D design.  I'm basing my design on this one from the Woodsmith folks.  No, I'm not stealing their design, they've published the plans, and what I do with any plan I see - or any item I see - is in my head, I start figuring how I could do it to make it fit my needs.  As a kid, as in back in the day when I had summer days to fill that didn't involve working for pay, or in the yard, I'd putz around in the garage.  

With a two-acre yard, I would have to mow it regularly, for which my parents paid me $2.  For the yard.  Mind you, we had riverbank, much of the yard was shaded, and there were some challenging spots.  About 1/4 of the yard was garden or what I thought of as raw materials.  Half of the southwest corner was my mother's garden.  Initially, it started with the local farmer coming over with his ... well, I guess we'd called it a cultivator - my father called him and arranged a price he'd pay for the fellow to rumble his tractor into the yard, then drop the thing from it's "stowed/traveling" position into the ground.  This thing had disks, probably about the size of saw blades, about 10-12", set on a steel shaft at an angle to the direction of travel.  It would bite into the ground and flip over the earth it turned up.

The first time he came through, it was a pretty big deal, but that corner hadn't been cleared out for some time.  When the house had belonged to my grandmother, she had placed her garden on the spot where my grandfather previously had kept his chicken coop.  Obviously, the soil was somewhat enriched by their byproducts, and her garden was pretty spectacular.  It was surrounded by a wire fence to keep some of the animals out, but she had vegetables, flowers, and paths.  And I stayed out of it because I could usually wander off the path and get into trouble by stepping on things.  

When we moved into the house, my father was made aware that the septic system which had previously been installed was no longer sufficient for a family of seven people.  Mind you, the home had begun as a cabin for a family of eight, plus guests, so as it was a temporary abode, it wasn't all that heavily used.  When grandma moved from town to the cabin, it was upgraded with a real basement and three bedrooms.  My mom and dad remodeled it, upgrading the garage to two cars, adding on a 24x26 foot addition with an entryway, a living room for the upstairs portion, and a bedroom, bathroom, utility room and office on the lower level.  

This addition also took out the septic tank which had been acceptable when built some 30 years before, but the new system would need to be much further from the edge of the river, so it went into the only place it could go - Grandma's garden.  And somehow, all of that wonderful black soil got mixed up and ended up not on top of the ground when the construction finished.  So when I'd mow that part of the lawn, much of it was dusty and did not have grass growing on it.  And with seven mouths to feed, my father and mother decided not to blow a whole lot of money on having the best looking yard in the neighborhood.  Granted, we probably had the biggest, as the neighbors to the north of us had a narrower yard that was slightly deeper.  To the south, the three properties there were all pretty narrow or not much room between the road and the riverbank.  Our yard was some 150 feet from road to riverbank, and only a few parts were out of range of the lawnmower, being too steeply banked or just not mowable, with grandma's rock garden.

But to get back to my central point, I spent a lot of time working in the garage as a kid at a folding table which got put up every night before my father pulled into the driveway.  So I have built other work tables, the heaviest of which is an eight foot long by 23 3/4" wide table with a 2x4 frame.  It's a construction table I built out of a particle-board shelf when that stuff was on sale for $4.99 for the shelf.  So it worked.  But it's hugely heavy, with the frame I added for construction, so I can bang and pound on the thing without any wobbles.  But takes two people to set up.  The one from Woodsmith is much lighter and easier to move.  Which is why I was thinking about building one.

The dresser is also in the early, dreamy stage.  Our current "bedroom set" is one we acquired from a friend of ours when she moved away some years ago.  It was inexpensive furniture, it's no criticism of her or the furniture, you get what you can when you move away from college, where they provided most of your furniture, and now you're out on your own, you get what you can.  She'd gotten a great deal, but was moving far away and did not want to pay to move a couch, a loveseat, a long, low dresser and a taller dresser.  We paid her a fairly reasonable price for them and replaced what we'd been using - most of which were open shelves and an old garage-sale find.  

Particle board does not have much strength, and over the years, with a continued load, will start to bend/warp/deform.  My wife's dresser is currently short one drawer which disintegrated when she opened it one morning and the front popped right off the drawer.  That's what happens when the 1/4" MDF sides are glued onto the 1/2" front MDF with no other fittings other than a few staples, fired in on an angle.

The camp stove table is one that I designed which I can level once it's on site so that the stove sits level and does not slide down hill while in use.  And it's made out of metal pipe so that it doesn't catch fire, and I can set it up and take it down.  It's five basic pieces, starting with the shelf that the stove is on, which would be made out of steel pipe with wire closet shelving attached, bolted to the pipe, to provide a ventilated surface for the stove.  The ends would be in two pieces, the upper part basically to permit hanging a lantern up above the work area so you could see what you were doing, and/or hang things like tools you'd need - spoons, spatulas, etc.  The lower portions of the legs would be built with some all-thread - just a metal rod with threads on it - to allow the lower portion of the legs to be adjusted so that the shelf sits level.  One end of the all-thread would be epoxied into a nut which would be epoxied into the bottom of one of the steel pipes.  The other end would have what's called a "coupling nut" think a hex nut about three nuts tall, that threads onto the all-thread just like a nut.  However, it would be epoxied into a couple of pieces of plywood to make a sort of handle I could grab to spin it to adjust the height of the shelf.  It would let me adjust the length of the leg to the exact height, and the bottom of the leg would have a small base to sit on the ground, and there would be a lawn "spike" (think big nail, about 8" long), which would prevent anything from sliding downhill.  It would just be in the ground to prevent it from sliding away.

Back to CAD - the design I have in my head for the camp kitchen is similar to one I overbuilt a few years ago.  Thinking at the time primarily of heavy-duty strength, I designed the thing and built it out of 3/4" plywood and 2x4s.  The exterior frame was 2x4s, a pair of which were used to make a clamp for the steel pipe legs that splayed out at about a 30" from vertical to provide some stability, and each interior shelf was supported full length across the entire 4-foot length with 2x4s under either edge.  Yeah, it was overbuilt to the point where it likely would have survived a nuclear blast.  The top was a truncated triangle - 24" wide at the bottom, 8" wide at the top about 22" above, but the sides both folded down so that you had a four foot wide by two foot deep countertop to work with.  Which worked.  It was just danged huge, heavy, and a pain in the posterior to move around.  

The new one would start with a bottom pair of 2x4s which would brace the base, and it would be built with the exterior of 3/4" plywood.  Internal shelves and dividers would be 1/2" plywood for shelves,  1/4" plywood for vertical dividers.  The front and back would again fold down for counter top, but the bright idea I thought I had was to build a pair of footlockers.

When I was in Scouts, most of our troop camping gear was stored in a couple of what we called "footlockers".  Big green boxes, about 36" long, 30" or so wide and tall, we'd remove the pots and pans we needed, and then set things on top of the footlockers to cook.  Back then, about 95% of our cooking was done over an open fire.  I'd gotten rather good at most of it, without a thermometer or anything like that.  We did have two steel grids we would set on rocks over the fire, and we could put pots or pans or cook directly on the grids.  One meal I planned and made for the guys which turned out very well was baked potatoes, chicken breasts, and salads.  I had a package of Oreos for dessert on the menu.  It worked well, because I'd added seasoning to the breasts before we froze them a few weeks before the trip, and I'd added barbecue sauce to either dip them in or glaze them with.  The group decision was to skip the glaze because some of the guys did not want their chicken that way.  But they liked the dinner.  There were a few complaints that I had not bothered to include sour cream for the baked potatoes, but I'd never had it on baked potatoes to that point, so I learned.

The real challenge with using those footlockers as cookstands was getting things out when people started using them for prep stands, or what ever.  So the ideas I had for mine were to open the side, not the top, so I could get things out of them while they were being used as stands.  And then the ideas started rolling around.

I wanted to keep the overall size of these footlockers to 24" wide by 24" tall.  Most plywood comes in 4x8 foot sheets.  That means that if I'm careful, I can get two pieces of 24" wide plywood for the top and bottom, and two pieces of plywood at 23 13/16" - that's because I calculate the average saw kerf at 1/8".  What's that?  Saw kerf?  One thing that tripped me up all the time when I was working with plain old graph paper was that when you slice up a piece of plywood, you don't use a knife.  You use a saw.  The difference is that a knife typically pushes two pieces apart by severing a joint they have.  While this does work with softer items and can be used with wood, the fact is that it requires an incredible amount of pressure to push a knife blade through 3/4" plywood.  So rather than knife two pieces apart, I have to use a saw.  Now, most hand saws have a blade that's maybe 1/16" of an inch thick.  Actually, the blade is not the full thickness of that number, but if you look closely at most saw blades, the cutting portion of the blade is made up of small teeth, each one of which is offset by a small amount to either side to help chip away the wood.  That chipping is what takes away some of the wood.  A circular saw blade is typically a little less than 1/8" wide, but if I account for it, then I may be pleasantly surprised at the end of the cut when it's straight, exactly on the line, and I may have a piece of wood that's 23 7/8" wide instead.  The 1/16" difference isn't much when it comes to projects like this for me.

Anyway, a cube has six sides, not four, so four pieces of plywood get me a long, square tube.  But then the ideas really started flowing.  First off, I need two of these footlockers, which means three sheets of plywood.  I also need four 24x24 ends - thereabouts - to turn these square tubes into boxes.  BUT - if I play my cards right, there are a couple of enhancements I can pull together here.

The first of which is that a 24" tall box does not give me a counter height of 30-32" tall, which is about where the standard counter height is.  So I could make the boxes wider, but then I'd need more plywood.  As the last time I checked 3/4" plywood was running around $70 a sheet, up quite a bit from the pre-pandemic prices of $40 a sheet, which is itself up from the $25 I'd become used to paying back in the 80s and 90s when I was doing this building stuff.  

Then transportation also kicked in.  I'm not getting younger, my wife is no slouch, but I need to figure out how to get this stuff where I want it to be in the camp site when I set up my camp.  Which means I need wheels.

And then I figure I had a wee bit of inspiration.

I figured out I could brace the outside of these boxes with a 2x3 frame.  A bit lighter, but still as strong as needed for my purposes, and as a 2x3 is actually only 1 1/2" thick by 2 1/2" wide, a frame outside these boxes, on both sides, adds only 3" to the overall width.  That's 27", a bit closer, but I need a bit more.  

And then the whole "level it off" thing stuck in my head.  I wanted to figure out how to set the whole thing up so that it was level, and the idea of building a 2x4 frame (that's 3 1/2" wide for a 2x4), and building into it four adjustable feet - each of which would be on a 7" long carriage bolt driven into a wooden foot which would hold the frame.  The carriage bolt would be driven through what's called a T bolt - that is, it's a bit of metal with a threaded socket which you pound into a hole you've drilled, and it has teeth to keep it from spinning in that hole - and if I put it on the bottom of the piece of wood, then the carriage bolt can be used to adjust the height of the frame to level it off, each foot being independent.  So then the wheels rolled in - ha, see what I did there?  

Anyway, what occurred to me was that if I could find a couple of bicycle wheels, not ultra-light ten speed wheels, but something in the 16" range, I could build myself an axle.  Ideally, I'd find another hunk of all-thread, and a bushing that would fit over it and fit inside any sort of ball-bearing hub that the wheel could use.  I'd attach the hub to the all-thread rod, run the rod through the middle of a pair of 2x6s (that are actually only 5 1/2" wide), and I could build the frame and trim the axle board so that it would fit tightly into a socket I build on the frame, so that I'd place the frame on top of the wheel, it would have a spot where I could grab it - after loading the footlocker on top of it - and wheeling it to the spot I wanted it - then move the axle out from under the footlocker, level the base, and do it with the other footlocker - then set the big camp kitchen on the top.

Then more things popped into my head.  I'd still need 3 sheets of plywood, but if I added 8 door hinges, I could make something else helpful. With two sheets of plywood, cut three 24" wide strips, then take the last piece, and cut it into 2 24x24" pieces.  There's my footlockers, without tops.  Which is where I cut that third sheet of plywood right down the middle, the long way, to get 2 pieces 96" long by 23 15/16" wide.  Then I cut one piece 48" long from each piece, and cut the rest in half.  With a pair of door hinges, I place the shorter pieces on the ends of the 48" long piece, so it's two layers thick but can be unfolded into almost 96" by 23 15/16" wide.  And use those as countertops on top of the footlockers.

I would build the footlockers with some T nuts on the insides of each box, and put some holes in the long center portion of the tops.  Then I could use a couple bolts to finger-tighten in and keep these extra counter tops stable with a 6" overhang over the footlockers, because I wanted the kitchen to overlap each side by 6".  Lost yet?  Well, here's a quick and dirty picture from Paint.

That's a front view way over there on the left on the top, and a side view on the right.  The bottom view would be ... I suppose we should call it the "drone view" from above.

The blue is the footlockers, I've drawn them without details, but they will be a 24x24x48" box with an exterior frame made from 2x3s, likely reinforcing the corners and the middle right where the edges of the camp kitchen land. 

The camp kitchen is the red box that's going to be 24" tall, 48" wide, and the base should be 24" wide, the top part will likely be between 8 and 12 inches wide.  It's drawn as 12 here, but the sides fold down to provide more counter top.

The green boxes and lines are the tops of the footlockers.  They will be 48" wide by 24" deep, with ends that fold out on each end - after removing them from the box - to give an additional amount of space - the total length will be 96" give or take a fraction of an inch.  

Lastly, the purple stuff you see in two views, not from above, are the leveling bases.  I haven't added the feet here, but they will be there.  That's the whole point of the base, aside from transport.  They will be a 2x4 frame that's 48" long, and it will have some bracing so I can add a set of wheels that's removable from each of the frames, so I only have to worry about moving one set of wheels to get both boxes where I need them.

All of the counter top will be the same level because it will be using the same support system.  I'm also considering some basic sort of simple legs to go under the ends of the green footlocker counter tops.  They'll need some sort of support under the ends because otherwise they will be pulling on the hinge screws, which will make that all weaker.  There is a thought that I could probably get the whole support thing done by simply adding a couple of 8 foot long 2x3s to my kit, and putting one under each of the green countertops.  If I make a sort of "socket" in the footlocker frames, then I can just set the 2x3 in the socket, put the countertop on them, and then towards the back of the center sections add a few holes, say 1/4", and put some T nuts on the inside of the footlocker so I can temporarily bolt the tops to the footlockers so they don't accidentally get knocked off when someone runs by and bumps them.  

So to get back to my point, I guess I'm going to need probably a dozen or more of these simple CAD drawings from my cad program I have to make this design make sense.  I do see some value to having a sort of CAD program linked to a database.  That is, after you establish the individual elements in a piece, you can run a report which tells you you need so many pieces of each type of wood.  Off the top of my head, for these footlockers, I can see that I will need the following:

Qty.	Leng.	Wid.	Matl.	Description
1	48"	24"	3/4" Ply	Footlocker Bottom
1	48"	24"	3/4" Ply	Footlocker Top
2	48"	23 7/8"	3/4" Ply	Footlocker Long Sides
2	23 7/8"	22 1/2"	3/4" Ply	Footlocker Ends
2	24"	23 7/8"	3/4" Ply	Footlocker Top Folding Ends
2	48"	2 1/2"	2x3	Bottom Long Side Feet
3	19"	2 1/2"	2x3	Bottom Cross-braced feet (ends and 1 middle)
12	19"	2 1/2"	2x3	Bottom Cross-braced feet (ends and 1 middle)
2	25 3/8"	2 1/2"	2x3	Vertical Bracing (L corners, 2 mid-long-side braces)
2	46 1/2"	3 1/2"	1x4	Interior Top Long Edge Reinforcement
2	21"	3/4"	1x4	Interior Top End Reinforcement

That, some screws, some hinges, and some sort of latching buckle I can attach to the edges of the counter that doesn't project too far or is too delicate, and I'm good to go.  Of course, as I sit here, another off-the-top-of-my-head thought is that the open side of that footlocker might not offer a whole lot of support, but if I include inside the box a pair of 2x3s, and provide cutouts around the inside top reinforcement, so when I open the footlocker, remove whatever I have in it, and grab the 2 2x3s and set them in the cutout so they provide vertical support on the open edges, then I should be good to go.  Easy enough.

Of course, that's another half-dozen sketches.  Maybe I should have stuck with pencil and paper...