Battery Charging Station

This is a small project I came up with an evening last week after clean­ing up my shop bench some. I’ve always just sat my bat­tery charg­ers on top of the bench area, but they take up pre­cious space there. After get­ting anoth­er Ryobi quick charg­er recent­ly, I fig­ured it was time to make a ded­i­cat­ed space for these. 

There’s no short­age of shop projects for this same pur­pose, but it seems that most folks are ok with putting their charg­ers on a shelf semi-per­ma­nent­ly. I fig­ured I would need to occa­sion­al­ly get the charg­ers off the shelf as well. So I built in a small chase such that the cords won’t inter­fere with the French cleat sys­tem and can eas­i­ly come out.

The dimen­sions of this project are very spe­cif­ic to the set of charg­ers I have (two dif­fer­ent Ryobi and a Bosch), as you can see here. How­ev­er, I’ve post­ed my set of plans below and it should be easy to change the dimen­sions for dif­fer­ent charg­ers. Just make sure to account for the pow­er cords!

I used pock­et holes to assem­ble the entire project (edit — which was made entire­ly from 3/4″ maple veneer ply­wood I already had on hand from repair­ing my kid’s bed). 28 pock­et holes is a lot for some­thing this small. But with the back split as in this design, I want­ed to makes sure it was plen­ty rigid. I could have glued it up as well, but by the time got it all dry fit, I fig­ured that would be overkill. I can always dis­as­sem­ble it and glue it lat­er. The real trick with this was get­ting to all those pock­et holes. Basi­cal­ly, but the shelf fronts on first and then put the back/sides onto the shelves.

Anoth­er small thing that made this lit­tle project fun: my table saw sled. I had real­ly been dis­ap­point­ed in using it. I put a decent amount of work into get­ting it right but it just was­n’t slid­ing well. I’d sand­ed the run­ners down as much as could (more and I fig­ured there be too much slop). I just hap­pened to buy some paste wax today as I’d seen it men­tioned in some videos. It real­ly should be stressed more: put paste wax on your table saw sled run­ners! The sled glides along with very lit­tle force now and cross-cuts are a breeze!

So this was a good lit­tle project and went off with (almost) no mis­takes thanks to putting in some decent plan­ning and tak­ing plen­ty of mea­sure­ments of what I want­ed to store. I say almost, as the cut-out above the bot­tom shelf to accom­mo­date the AC adapter was ini­tial­ly cut with­out account­ing for the bot­tom shelf depth. Anoth­er quick pass on the band saw and it fit fine.

In case you can’t quite read those sheets on my rolling work­bench, here are my plans for any­one so inclined to build some­thing like this. One poten­tial mod­i­fi­ca­tion would be to put some han­dles (either hard­ware attached to the top of the sides or hand­holds cut into the sides) and a bungie cord across the front of the low­er shelf. That way, with just unplug­ging one cord, I could take all my charg­ers with me.