After a few months of working with our original cart, we realized that we needed an upgrade.   Ok ok…Wilbur admits that maybe a sheet of aspen wasn’t such a good idea for a top.  The clamps kept falling off and then they dug into the wood.  He then thought “Pine would be nice” and that’s when the girl geese screamed “But Pine is a SOFT WOOD TOO!!!”   Wilbur whined about his delicate goose bones and how heavy plywood is blah blah.   That’s when the girls finally put their slippered feet down and said “Look, bring us a plywood top or no dinner!!!”   As you can imagine, Wilbur grabbed his dutiful assistant, Carson, and they ran quickly to Home Depot for a piece of plywood! 

This go around we went for a larger top so that we could have all 4 poles in action.  So we got the top 54x28.   We wanted it a hair longer on each side to accommodate our clamp on light.   Then, we needed more width to accommodate two machines better (the original was design was for one machine and then we attached the second one).

Then, Wilbur thought he was so brilliant…a nice big basket shelf could hold the lids for the machines and give us a nice place for sponge bars and other things we don’t use often.   Why a “basket”?   We didn’t want the carriage movement to shake the table and ultimately cause an avalanche of stuff.   The sides would prevent the stuff from falling down on our delicate goose heads.

So here is Cart 2.0…Wilbur thought it was brilliant…until nothing would knit.  The tension wires were being blocked by the basket thus causing bad tension constantly.     Then, it seems that Wilbur’s tape measure was a bit inaccurate…the midgauge is wider than the standard gauge and the midgauge is 1/4” wider than the distance between the poles !!!  WILBUR – what were you thinking???

This is Cart 2.0 with a top BASKET

Tension wires blocked by the brilliant basket…

Bump – OOPS…machine can’t clear the pole…Wilbur, why didn’t you use a decent tape measure????

Welcome Cart 2.1 – tension wires have much more clearance to tension properly, but the shelf is low enough to prevent the wires from flying into delicate goose eyes.

We also shifted the table top…but unfortunately, Wilbur mismeasured again and it’s still 1/2” off.   The girls gave him a break…we’re going to knit awhile before making more adjustments to the table top.  

We considered putting the basket on top of the shelf and attaching it with some nylon ties.  Problem?  There won’t be any clearance between the ceiling and the basket so that we can add/remove items.     That’s just not good.   We are thinking that if we can find a shallower basket we can still store our lids up there and we’d get enough clearance between the ceiling and basket to insert/remove stuff.     Maybe an under bed carrier with holes to tie it to the shelf…   We’re not putting heavy stuff up there so it should be ok and maybe if there’s a lid, nothing will fall on us. 

Of course, our cart will need the white curtains to make it clean looking…we have the sheets, just no time to sew.  That’s next week’s activity! 

Oh…and we can’t forget to mention safety.  Adding such large top modifies the center of gravity of the cart.  We have 43lbs of extra dumbbell weights attached to the center of the first shelf to try to weight it down.  It does add stability.  Plus, the carriages, tools etc add an addition 10+ lbs.  Also, we have balanced the machines so that we don’t have one causing it to want to tip in one direction or another.    If we had little gosslings, we’d put fasteners to attach it to the wall because this cart is really asked to be climbed upon and a tipover could be tragic.   But with no pets (other than Barkley) and no gosslings, we think the cart will be fairly safe.

A view of the backside with our ribber attached – This is the SK840 + SRP60N.  The ribber makes the machine quite front heavy…this is why we tell you to be quite careful and watch the center of gravity!:

Improvement 2.3, we attached an under bed carrier to the top with wire ties.  It did block some of the light   But we are storing more stuff up there and don’t fear that it’ll tumble down on our heads.

   <---a better view of our machine with ribber/ribber cover