The scene of the crime

Before I start blogging about what I do in the workshop, I should probably show it to you.  So here it is.

This is the two-car garage of my home in Maryland.  It hasn’t actually housed a vehicle since November 1997, when I first moved in.  After my first shop, which was about an 8×10 section of semi-finished basement adjacent to the laundry room, this feels luxuriously spacious, though I find that floor space is at a premium.

Highlights of the shop (along the walls, left to right):

• On the left edge of the photo you can see most of the newest addition, a storage unit.  The drawers hold fasteners and sanding supplies, and my shop vacuum (a Sears model from the 1990’s) lives in the center well.  That’s a ceramic heater jutting out from it diagonally; I use that in the cold season to keep the garage at 65 degrees so my wood glue and finishes will stay usable.
• Next up is my back work table, which in the photo is covered in white craft paper because I was experimenting with finish for the queen bed I just finished (and will be posting about eventually).  Made in about 1992, it’s composed of particleboard and 2×4; my father helped me build it, as I was just getting started.  It will be replaced with something more versatile.
• My clamp rack is on the wall in the far left corner.  You can see the pipe clamps, but there is also an assortment of bar clamps (Irwin Quick-Grips, Bessey Tradesman, and a few generics I bought at Harbor Freight).  My cutoffs are also kept in that corner, sorted in large boxes in an attempt to keep them quasi-organized.
• Against the back wall is another shop-made work table/storage cabinet.  The drill press in the photo, a Tradesman (“sold exclusively by Hechinger”), was recently replaced with a Jet JDP-12 that I bought at Woodcraft of Rockville, MD.  This was also my first router table, though I no longer use it for that purpose.
• Next comes my Sears Craftsman 12-inch band saw.  This is a classic old workhorse, inherited from my father who purchased it in the early 1970’s.  It’s older than all of my children but it still cuts smoothly and accurately.
• Next to that is my Penn State Industries DC-2 dust collector, which I bought in 2000 or so.  It’s 1-1/2hp induction motor is quiet but gets the job done.  I don’t have an elaborate duct system for it; just a cyclone separator made from a metal trash can and a plastic lid, and a few lengths of flexible hose.  I use the DC with the table saw and the planer.
• On the right side you can see my planer set up on a knockdown work support I built from plans in ShopNotes #87.  The planer is also from Penn State; it’s a first-generation 12-inch surface planer.  PSI doesn’t make it any more, nor do they sell parts for it, so if it ever breaks I’ll have to replace it.  Like all of the early “portable” (it has a handle, so it’s portable, right?) planers it snipes like crazy, so when using it I clamp a pair of outfeed support blocks to the work support.  That minimizes the snipe problem.
• The overhead garage door itself is packed with cellulose foam insulation.  It makes the door a lot heavier — so heavy that I had to replace the spring with a much stronger one in order to even open the door — but because of it that ceramic heater and a smaller one on the other side (visible on the work table to the right of the drill press) can keep the place around 65 degrees even during the winter.

Women should be on regular exercise, proper stress management and healthy food diet with extra proteins. tablets viagra online purchase generic viagra http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/10/27/empress-forgotten-paths-russian-song/ But all of them are not so much dependable. Zenegra is unquestionably an excellent drug prescription cialis deeprootsmag.org to ditch ED. There are nearly millions of men with erectile generic cialis browse around my shop now disorder, so you are not alone in this battle.
In the middle of it all is my table saw.  It’s a Delta 34-444 Contractor’s Saw (original model), bought new in 1996, though it’s been so heavily modified that it may not be immediately recognizable.  The original base, stamped steel extension wings, and Jetlock fence are all gone.  I built the base cabinet and new extensions myself to better support the 50-inch Vega fence system I added in 1998.  Drawers in the base store my dado, spare blades, and a lot of the handheld power tools and accessories that I use the most.

The right extension is a torsion box with a 1/4-inch plywood top and a layer of high-pressure laminate for smoothness and easy sliding of material.  The open shelf underneath that is where I keep push blocks, the Vega stop block and stock pusher accessory, and the router table’s auxilliary fence.  (And a tape measure, sometimes a clamp or two, a pencil, the remote on/off control for the dust collector, etc …)

The left side extension is my router table — one of these days I’ll take a photo of it.  It also has a plastic laminate top, and the typical rectangular mounting plate for the router.  Drawers store my router bits (1/4-inch shanks on the left, 1/2-inch on the right) and the accessories — wrenches, collets, what have you.  For a fence, I use a box-style auxilliary fence that I clamp to the Vega fence.  It has the usual split-face design and a 2-1/4 inch dust collection port; by clamping it to the Vega fence I get to use Vega’s micro-adjust mechanism for fine positioning.  The router itself is a venerable Porter-Cable 690, for which I have all three bases; the plain base gets used in the table, while the D-handle and plunge bases are used for hand-held routing tasks.

I know it’s a bad idea, but I do tend to use the tablesaw’s long table (it measures a little shy of 7 feet) as an assembly table and a finishing table, too.  I cover it with plastic sheeting for finishing and wipe up glue from the laminate when necessary.

In front of the saw (from the photo’s angle, anyway) is a rolling cart that I use for storage of small hand tools, sharpening gear, and miscellaneous stuff.  I have another one just like it tucked into the corner with the cutoffs, but it’s mostly empty.

The rest of the garage, not visible in the photo, is mixed use storage.  There’s a wooden shelf unit that doubles as my wood rack, where I store the boards I buy for each project and the milled parts that I make from them while the piece is taking shape; the usual assortment of snow shovels and garden tools; a few automotive things (though I have zero car mechanics aptitude so it’s really a minimal few things); the trash and recycling bins, of course.  We have a full-sized freezer to supplement what’s in the kitchen and a dorm-size refrigerator where I keep a few cold drinks handy.  Nothing worth a photo, in other words.

So there’s the 50-cent tour.  Now you know where the fun takes place.

Comments are closed.