The Shop Environment

I realize a lot of weekend woodworkers are looking at my Web site. This page is for you - let me know what you think and what else you need to know.

General Thoughts

I have a few general thoughts for the hobbyist:

• Making wonderful stuff doesn't require great or expensive machinery. Beauty comes from the skills in your hands, the confrontation with ideas in your head, and the commitment to looking hard at your work with a critical eye.

• Clean up after you are finished for the day. You can make a fresh mess tomorrow.

• Buy tools as you need them. You don't need to "set up a shop" to begin working. Buy the tools you need to do the project you have in mind, and then go from there. There's no such thing as a complete shop - to this day I average a new "something" a couple of times a month. Start with a Black & Decker Workmate (get the big one) and the hand tools you need to make the project you envision. Then make and finish the project. Unless you want to collect tools for their own sake, this approach to making furniture will work, I promise. It allows you to acquire tools as your knowledge base grows - everything in its own time.

• You can REALLY stretch the capabilities of low-end equipment by using first class accessories. For example, I buy low-end professional machinery, but my hand tools are all first rate. In addition, the accessories for my machinery are first class. After-market miter gauges, fences, turning chucks, and saw blades should all be of the highest quality. Remember, if you decide to upgrade your machinery, you can use the accessories on the new tools.

• Safety is really important. It doesn't only save your limbs, it allows you to work better. Using the blade guard on your table saw helps you feed the stock in an easy, relaxed manner. This makes for better, more accurate cuts. I use all the safety guards, on all my tools, all the time. I don't find that it takes more time. I find it takes less time because I make fewer mistakes.

• I wear a full face shield, hearing protection and Dustfoe dust mask (available from Highland Hardware) when I work. The face shield is very comfortable, unlike safety goggles, and offers much more protection than safety glasses. In addition, all my eyeglasses are now made of polycarbonate. You can even get progressive lenses in poly. Think of it as cheap insurance.

• The shop environment is also a tool. Spend one day a month making shop improvements. This does not just mean making new jigs, which is part of the normal production process. It means adding a shelf or a drawer next to the "XYZ" machine so you can have the "gizmo" attachment just when and where you need it. If you need the same screwdriver at two different places in the shop all the time, buy a second screwdriver and put one in each place - it's only a couple of dollars. Don't be afraid to move a machine from one side of the room to the other if you think it will work better there. You'll have to move the drawer you just made and the gizmo attachment, but that's okay because you have the whole day. Put in enough light so you can see what you're doing - use the 100 watt bulb, not the 40 watt! A workshop that is well laid out, well lit, and clean will add more to quality of your work than will expensive tools. Scott Landis' book "The Workshop Book" is a good place to go for help with this.

• Keep your tools sharp. Remember that the expression is "deadly dull," not "deadly sharp."

Setting up a Shop

In order to produce furniture, every shop, no matter what size, uses eight basic operations: making boards, making one side of the boards flat, making the other side parallel to the first, ripping the boards, crosscutting them, drilling holes in them, cutting curves out of them, and making a board round. That's it. What about making joints? The same tools used to do these operations are used to make joints.

These operations are accomplished with six power tools: a band saw, a jointer, a planer, a table saw, a drill press, and a lathe. You can buy these six power tools new for approximately $2300 (low end) . The next jump up is approximately $7500. The jump after that is $20,000. My advice to everyone is to start at the low end. No single tool should cost more than $500. You can make very good furniture with these tools. I know. I did. If you outgrow the tools, you can always resell them for about half of what you paid for them to the next generation of hobbyists. As a matter of fact, you should look to buy low-end tools second hand when you're starting out. If you do that, the $2,300 becomes $1,200.

The reason I recommend starting out at the low end is that you need all those tools to make furniture. If you start out by buying a $1,500 table saw, you won't have much left for a jointer and planer. And at a minimum those are the three tools you can not do without. But if you spend $500 on a table saw, and $400 on a jointer, and $400 on a planer, you will have enough left over to buy a bunch of clamps, a Workmate, and a vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess you're about to make. You're way ahead of the game at this point, while the person with the $1500 table saw is struggling to make his boards flat and square.

Organizing the Shop

Carleton Woodworking is located in the historic Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, in a building filled with painters, sculptors, potters and other woodworkers. The space is wonderful. South-facing windows fill it with light, and loading docks at both ends make it very efficient. It’s perfect! Take a tour of my shop.

When I moved in and organized the shop I wrote a paper about that process. You can find that paper here.

Tooling

The center of any woodshop is the table saw. Mine is a General 350 with Biesemeyer fence and a sliding table and blade guard made by Excalibur. The General is a rock-solid, heavy-duty machine. I've added a sliding table so that I can comfortably and safely handle sheet goods single-handedly. The blade guard combined with a Biesemeyer splitter is very easy to use and never in the way - a big improvement over standard basket guards. The guard is ALWAYS on the saw.

The Biesemeyer fence is very smooth, solid and accurate. I migrated from an Excalibur fence which would never hold its position. The Bies doesn't move even when I knock it with heavy sheet goods.

Processing sheet goods with a table saw takes up a lot of room. Ideally, you want at least 8 feet in front and back of the blade to rip and to the left of the blade so you can square the short edge. Plus you need at least 4 feet on the right side of the blade. Giving yourself a two-foot clearance around all the possible cutoffs gives you a space of 16' x 18' or about 300 square feet: about 30% of the floor space in my shop! You also need in- and outfeed tables on order to get accurate cuts. While you can use the spaces below the tables for storage (they get pretty dusty) the majority of the space is effectively lost. This means you have to be very careful about where to place the saw.

If you are new to working with sheet goods, you'll be surprised just how heavy and unwieldy a 4' x 8' sheet of MDF is (about 100 pounds). Be careful! Get it rough cut at the lumberyard into more manageable pieces.

A new addition to my tool arsenal has really changed my life: a PanelHandler by ShopCarts. The PanelHandler is a cart that can hold up to eight sheets of plywood. The plywood can be tipped from vertical to horizontal and raised and lowered so it's level with the table saw. It acts as an input table, allowing complete control of the sheets as they're fed into the saw. I'm getting very accurate results and no one has to lift those 100-pound sheets of MDF any more. It also makes a terrific adjustable bench. At $1000, it's not a hobbyist tool, but it's great in my shop.

I have an after-market Accu-Miter miter gauge. I recommend this tool: get the big one. The low-end Delta tenon cutter is also a great tool.

I bought my Inca 259 table saw for the mortising table attached to it, which is a great asset when making chairs. This saw is no longer being made because the table tilts rather than the blade. This design is now illegal in Europe, where the saw was made. These beautiful little saws have become collector's items and are now selling for $1200 and up depending on their condition! (I actually had one guy say to me, "What do I have to offer you to sell me the saw?") The 20mm arbor (you have to get non-standard blades and dado) and the non-standard-sized miter gauge bar slot make the saw expensive to maintain. Unless you need the mortising table, stick with a standard table saw.

Mortising is done with a Multico PM12 hollow chisel mortiser. While it is twice the price of other machines, this tool is heavy duty. I used a mortising attachment to my drill press for years, but am much happier with a stand-alone machine.

I use a Delta 14" band saw with a riser. I need the riser for resawing and to cut bowl blanks. As long as you keep this machine well tuned, it works beautifully for resawing. I have the lowest HP motor on this saw and haven't yet had any real problem except when cutting tropical wood bowl blanks: I just go slower.

A Delta radial drill press.

A Makita 12" LS1211 sliding compound miter saw was bought to cut large 16/4 turning squares.  I've built a stop system on a 4' fence attached to the saw using Mark Duginske's FastTrack system (available from Garrett Wade).

I bought an Inca 570 Jointer/Planer because the 6" jointer I had just wasn't big enough to handle the large boards I find myself using more and more often. The 10-1/2" jointing capacity of this machine is substantial. Getting anything larger than that would cost me three times as much. I've kept my 10" Ryobi planer so I don't need to convert the Inca back and forth between jointing and planing. Now my jointing and planing capacity match.

My router table is a 140-pound cast iron table available from Innovative Shop Solutions. The weight of this table combined with a 3 HP router gives me the power of a small shaper. I've also added a 1/4 HP power feeder. I use an Incra split fence attached to an Incra Jig - the old one - with the additional micro-adjuster.

My bench is an industrial workbench with a maple top I got from Grainger's (stock # 7W156). I've drilled 3/4" holes in the top to accept the Veritas "Bench Dogs" and "Wonder Dogs." I use a Workmate when I need it.

I do my veneering in a vacuum bag made by Vacuum Pressing Systems of Brunswick, Maine.

My turning is done on a Delta 46-700 lathe. Don't laugh. I've used this lathe both to learn on and to turn professionally since it first came out in 1992. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I often turn on it for several hours a couple of times a week. I have literally thousands of hours on this tool - not bad for a $400 investment. I've even made riser blocks increasing its capacity to 16" in diameter. I've also added an additional bed. With the extra bed, I can now turn work up to 8' in length.

I use a Woodchuck Milling System - MA10 for milling. This is Phantom Engineering's low-end system, which I got second hand. This router-based system can cut many types of profiles not possible with a lathe alone, including spiral patterns such as rope and barleytwist, as well as reeds and flutes.

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Last updated 01/02/06