With the washers sorted, I started on the cart’s base. The base is a panel with a skirt, an upside-down, open box. A dado running front-to-back in the center of the base holds the bottom edge of a triangular brace.

The base is wide enough that I had to make it from two pieces. I drilled some dowel holes so I could dry-fit the two pieces. I wanted to be able to separate them because I had a specific plan for cutting the brace dado.

I built a simple jig for drilling the rack pivot holes. I used it and the tip of a brad-point drill bit to mark the hole positions in the top of the base.

I used the same jig (flipped upside down) to mark the pivot hole positions in the underside of the cart’s top cap.

Then I drilled stopped holes with the drill press.

 

To cut the brace dado, I separated the two halves. Then I set the blade to 1/8” height and set the fence so the blade cut a narrow rabbet on the inside of each piece. (In this case, two rabbets equals one dado.) I gradually moved the fence closer to the blade to widen the rabbets to sneak up on the final dado width.

I got a nice tight dado.

Although I’m writing about the base here, I also cut the dado for the back panel at this point. It was one piece, but I used a similar technique. I set the fence to cut a groove near the center of the panel. I rotated the panel 180 degrees and ran it over the blade again. Those two cuts resulted in a narrow dado perfectly centered in the panel. To widen the dado, I shifted the fence away from the blade, made two more cuts, and repeated the process.

In the end, I cut the dado slightly too wide, but not too wide to be usable.

Before assembling the base, I also drilled the holes for the casters (which have 1" wheels and threaded posts and inserts) on the base’s underside. I positioned them as close to the corners as I could while allowing the casters to swivel 360 degrees. I was worried about the cart’s stability, so wider was better.

After that, I cut the mitered skirt sides, drilled more dowel joint holes, and glued the base together, using packing tape to clamp the corners.