Mostly Finished With Tool Chest Welding Cart

[Chips O'Toole]

Made some people mad when I came up with this idea, but they will get over it.

A company called All-a-Cart makes welding cart kits under the brand name ZTFab. They sell you a few pieces of bent steel, unpainted, and you attach them to a Harbor Freight tool chest. The kit lets you attach a couple of bottles to a chest. They also include things for hanging cables. I priced a kit, and the cost was $310, shipped. This is only $10 less than a US General tool chest.

I thought this was a very bad deal, and I annoyed people when I said so. I decided to make my own cart. I looked at Youtube, and sure enough, I was not the first.

I created a couple of horizontal supports from rectangular tubing, and I put a piece of 1/8" plate across them to hold two bottles. I attached the tubing to the chest's bolt holes, and I moved two of the casters to the end of the platform, welding them to the tubing instead of bolting them on. I'll post photos.

I'm going to make a bracket to restrain my bottles, and I'll put in some holes for TIG wire tubes. I'll paint the whole project, minus the chest, with truck bed coating. Total cost, including the chest, will be maybe $420. It would have been less, but I had a hard time finding M8 65mm bolts. I'm going to make a second cart, so I ordered bolts from Ebay, and they'll be here before I start.

The steel cost around $32.

This cart will hold two machines, like my existing carts, but it will also hold a ton of welding paraphernalia so I won't leave it on the table and floor all the time. It will take up about the same amount of room as my old carts, but it will get a lot more stuff out of my way, and it will put my machines at eye level, where they should be.

I think you have to be nuts to pay ZTFab's prices, but for some reason, a lot of Youtubers are very excited about their products. A ZTFab welding cart (standalone, with no tool chest) costs about $450, and you have to weld it together and paint it. I can't figure out why anyone would want one, but Youtube metalworkers act like it's the invention of the century.

 

[Nutfarmer]

I really like all the extra storage so to don't have to hunt down things every time you need it. You can keep all the welding tools in one place. Even with storage and bottles it takes up less floor space than my Lincoln tig welder. Good idea.

 

[cbellanca]

Good idea, nice job putting it together.

 

[PHPaul]

Lessee here...$300+ and assembly time, or $30+ and an afternoon playing with my toys in my shop. Lemme grab my calculator and do the math on that one...

Nice job!

 

[NC Rick]

I went through the same thinking process. There is way too much stuff for my welding to fit onto something like the Z-fab cart. I built this a couple years ago but is not dissimilar to yours. I took a little different approach. Nice job! BTW, z-fab is a really great company!
I'm staring to think about a water cooler and my grand plan failed to consider that!

 

[Chips O'Toole]

Today I got more steel and made the top of the tank bracket. I needed two recesses for the bottles, and I decided to make them round even though I didn't need to.

I didn't know what to use to guide the plasma cutter. Then I remembered my #10 cans of pizza sauce. They're the perfect size. If you press a torch against one and go around it, it will give you a hole exactly right for a 7" bottle.

I'm going to drill holes in the top for TIG wire. This will make the bracket lighter.

No pizza sauce was harmed in the making of this project.

 

[hman]

@Chips O'Toole - You're really doing a nice job making the basic kit a lot more functional!

I did nearly the same with an HF 4-drawer cart. Mine was designed to accommodate enough cables for MIG, TIG welding and Plasma cutting, plus a 240 volt extension cord. I also went to larger wheels at the tank end because of the weight. The axle keeps the tank bottoms"contained." The upper tank bracket can be repositioned upwards as needed for full sized tanks.


... and, like NC Rick, I added a fire bottle to the other end.

 

[Boswell]

I wish I had seen these Tool Box welding carts before I had purchased one. They look easy and very effective.

 

[C-Bag]

@Chips O'Toole - You're really doing a nice job making the basic kit a lot more functional!

I did nearly the same with an HF 4-drawer cart. Mine was designed to accommodate enough cables for MIG, TIG welding and Plasma cutting, plus a 240 volt extension cord. I also went to larger wheels at the tank end because of the weight. The axle keeps the tank bottoms"contained." The upper tank bracket can be repositioned upwards as needed for full sized tanks.
View attachment 341528

... and, like NC Rick, I added a fire bottle to the other end.
View attachment 341529

I went even more minimalist and based mine around a 3drw file cabinet. Mostly for the bottom file drawer for my welding helmet, gloves and sleeves. I’m to the point of figuring out the cable hangars. What did you do for yours hman? Closeup if you please.

 

[Chips O'Toole]

I don't know why I called this a one-day project, not including paint. That's only true if 1) you have all your materials when you start, 2) you don't make major mistakes, 3) you don't change the design on the fly, and 4) you don't have to buy any new tools. This is not a hard project at all, but the four factors listed above are dragging it out.

Today I put the upper bottle restraint in place using M6 screws around 25mm long, and I put doodads on the bottle platform to keep TIG wire tubes from moving around.

I drilled one of my big holes in the wrong place. I tried to locate the hole saw pilot drill in a small pilot hole, and I missed. I decided to take one of the disks I had cut out, weld it back in, grind it fair, and do the hole over. That killed some time.

This upper restraint will work just fine, but if you have a shop idiot who likes to lean on the wrong things, it could probably be bent if he's fat enough. I'm not sure. I might get a couple of lengths of 1" square tubing and connect the bottom platform to the upper one. If I do that, I can weld cable hooks to the tubing, and maybe a hook for the torch. That would be pretty sweet. It would save me drilling holes in the box and attaching brackets to the back.

The drawers come out easily. There are little plastic gadgets in the slides. You pull one up and the other one down, and you slide the drawer out.

I can't wait to fill this cart. My shop looks like someone had a series of seizures in it.