Saturday, March 5, 2011

Low Cost Shop Made Leveling Feet

My shop is in my garage.  The terrain out there is kind of lumpy, with a noticeable slope towards the door.  So when I built my shop furniture, I definitely needed to provide adjustable support of some sort to make up for the uneven floor.

For my first project, I got some fancy feet from Rockler.  These worked great, but after paying about $25 for a set of four, I started looking around for a Plan B.

On my second and subsequent projects, I got by for a lot less money by gluing blocks of wood behind my toe kicks everywhere I wanted a foot.  Then I drilled a hole and embedded a nut in each block to accommodate a carriage bolt.  I potted the nuts in J-B Weld to make sure they would stay put.

If you don't mind a gap of 3/4" or so between the toe kicks and the floor, it's easy to turn the carriage bolts with a Crescent wrench.  If you want the toe kicks closer to the floor, use a hacksaw to make a big fat screwdriver slot in the threaded end of each carriage bolt.  Then you can adjust them through a hole in the cabinet base just like the Rockler guys do.

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