The drill press seems to need a lot of stuff - forstner bits, brad point bits, regular drill bits, mortising attachment, mortising chisels, a fence, various hold downs etc.. These things all seem to have legs and if you don't corral them they scamper away and hide.

So I decided make a simple drawer unit for under the drill press. Convenient - another quick and dirty. Ply carcass, a face frame and a few slap together drawers - a big long one for the mortising attachments, a couple of smaller ones for bits etc..

Drew it up and here's what happened

Made the carcass with scrap ply - the sides being some scrap cherry. Put a coat of shellac on the cherry sides and they looked nice so I did the face frame out of quarter sawn oak. Decided on graduated drawers. That looked nice so I bought a nice long board with interesting grain for the drawer faces.

Laying out the drawer faces on the long board was real fun. Wanted continuous grain left/right and that would flow niceley top to bottom. Couple of framing squares, some chalk and a lot of trial and error later and I had this (see below)

More decisions- through or half blind dovetails? Flush mount or overlay the drawer fronts? Roundover or chamfer the edges?

Went with hard edges - can always roundover or chamfer later.

The line drawings helped but didn't include the grain. So off to PhotoShop to see what things would look like with the actual wood.

With the scrap from the big drawer board I made the top then breadboarded and doweled maple ends on.

Did I metnion that because the drawer faces came out so nice I did the drawer sides and back with maple? Of course the overlay drawers have half blind dovetails on the front AND shellaced quarter inch cherry ply drawer bottoms. They fit snug and if I had a back on this thing I'd need to leave space for the air to get out when I closed the drawers.

All the drill press stuff fits in four of the seven drawers. Guess I'll have to find more stuff to fill the remaining drawers. The top's so pretty I'm afraid to put anything on it for fear of scratching the five layers of shellac. Have to keep telling myself "It's just shop furniture!".