Show Us Your Woodworking Shops

As I said, with the heat and humidity here, I have been working a little and cooling and resting a lot on this. My son and wife have both helped at times but for the most part I have been by myself on this one. Today I got the last of the interior walls framed and in place. I have left off the last two studs closest to the building so I would have a walkway while working on it. Keeps me from having to go all the way around each time I need something. The room on the west end of the building will be a finishing room. There will be a set of French Doors here and I will open up a window on the front side. I want to let in as much natural lig…

Just playing around a little this morning, and I found our old video of our shop dogs, they are still with us today! Do you have a shop family member you'd like to share here on The Patriot Woodworker?

After over a year of waiting the shop expansion is finally underway. About a month ago which was a year later, I got the footings dug so we could ready to pour them and the concrete slab all at the same time. I had to move my electrical going to the shop before the footing and slab could be done so I got that done and a new box in the shop to give me more circuits and additional power. So with the footings dug, I could finally get the concrete guy lined up and thankfully he was where he could get right on it and pour the footings and slab all in one pour. After it started to setup, they got on it and put a…

I don't have much area in my shop, just half a garage. Therefore it has be organized so that I can utilize my tools and to keep most of them in a place where I can find them. I have posted pictures before. Anyway the other day I got a great compliment. I had the garage door open and the USPS made a delivery. As he handed me the small package, he looked around and said "This has to be the best and coolest garage in town"

Even after the rearrangement of the shop after the first of the year, we are still just too tight for the work we are doing. So we have decided to add on to the side of the shop. I am planning on adding 12' by 32' to the current shop which is 24'x32. I am afraid it will still be too small but I guess you can never get them large enough. We had a maple tree die and had to take it down so the shop is going where the tree was. About all we have been removing are roots. The digging has been quite hard. Even with all of the lines located, my son hit the gas line that was going to the shop. Fortunately it was going to have to be relocated anyway so we just turned i…

This weekend we took out one of the old garage doors and replaced it with a regular door. As I get ready for the shop expansion, the entrance door was on the side of the shop. When we dig all of that out and the get ready and pour concrete I wasn't going to have a way in and out of the shop without raising the garage door. Long story, but it was going to be way too much trouble and the door was in bad shape anyway. So the old door came out and we Josh and I framed up and install a new door to the shop from the front. When I a ready to open the side up and attach the new addition, I will take down the siding over there and put on the front, so this is just temporary fo…

Here is a new panoramic view of the shop taken the other night.

Thanks to some friends' generosity, I have a new machine - a Ryobi SC165VS 16" Scroll Saw. I have called it the Green Machine. This grows my shop by a third - from two machines (lathe and grinder) to three machines with the addition of the scroll saw. This completes my plans for my shop. My next task is to make a table for the scroll saw and THEN learn how to really use it to it's full potential.

I know this is not a shop tour or anything like that, but I was going back in my time warp and a couple years ago I shot a quick video of our two dogs playing with each other, it's amazing how our bigger dog Jessie lets our little dog Woody just take over, the two love each other, and they play like this all the time, I thought it was pretty funny, they were actually going at it for a good 10 minutes before I shot the rest of their wrestling adventure. And the names? You ever seen Toy Story? Woody and Jessie? My kids named the dogs, what can I say.

This is my entire shop. I am a full-time wheelchair user and therefore can no longer have a basement shop and we have no garage. I must work in our living space if want to work. I have just two stationary power tools: A Harbor Freight Variable Speed Mini-Lathe which I use to turn pens, bottle stoppers, christmas ornaments and the like. Having a lathe means you need to sharpen your turning tools and thus the other power tool is a Rikon 8" slow speed grinder with OneWay Wolverine Sharpening Jig. I use a 35-year-old Craftsman 8 gallon shop vacuum for dust collection with a rockler lathe dust hood. I keep pen parts and blanks in the two (stacked) cabinets visible behin…

Last mid year our PC took a dive, and we had to purchase another PC for our home, and it was kind of a blessing in disguise as this PC I am now typing on, is pretty danged cool, it's like a new pair of glasses. Our old PC was purchased in 2006, so it was old as far as PC's go, but a good PC, a Gateway, heavy as heck too! This is the 3rd time we have replaced a PC in the 23 years we have been married, so we are doing pretty good by making them last. And as we replace them, we'll hold on to the tower for a couple years till it finally just gets in our way, and we'll run down and dispose it at the electronics recycle yard across town, minus the hard drive, I hold onto those…

As I was cleaning out my shop further today, I came across a brand new in the box plug cutter and a matching drill bit! It was like Christmas! I wonder what else is hiding in those crevices?

I spent the last two days building a new cabinet. I had all of my 10" saw blades stashed in my router table storage so I decided to build a cabinet to relocate the blades by the table saw. Next I'm going to re-work the router table cabinet and build three more drawers for more router bits. How long do you think this cabinet will stay empty. BTW, I got lazy on this cabinet and bought the doors. $3 apiece. Couldn't build them for that. As a point of interest, the shelf full of cutoffs in the left side of the picture decided they liked the floor better than the shelf about 5 minutes after I took the picture. Sigh..

Well my shop ReDo is complete with the exception of hooking up the DC to the table saw, jointer and router table. I had planed to do that last night and picked up the PVC pipe but when I got home I realized I didn't have any PVC glue. Plenty of cleaner, but no glue so I decided to do a few other things and finish that tonight. I flipped the table saw around from where it once was giving me more open area behind the saw and a place that when we bring wood into the shop we are at either the chop saw or table saw to start. The Band saw stayed close to where it was but is now on wheels and I can push it back against the wall and pull it out to make cuts. …

I am making progress on the shop redo but it is going slow. I am only working on it when I get home at night so it is about 6:30 to 7:00 when I get into the shop. To make things worse, it has been raining here everyday so I couldn't move anything outside while we moved things around. I have moved somethings at least a dozen times just to get to where I needed to be. I was never good at rubik's cube but that what this feels like. I know you can't tell much about what is going on but we are getting things close to where the tools will be located. This layout is giving me more room about the tools and more open space in the shop. My shop is a two car garage separate from…

Last year was a great year working in the shop but it sure pointed out many short falls in the layout. But we were so busy and I just didn't have the strength after the surgery to change things. Since Christmas rush is over we are taking a break and redoing the shop. A better flow from bring the wood into the shop to working through the process and back out with the finished project. Right now on paper it looks great, I'll let you know how it goes when we put it all back together. This weekend I got everything taken apart and started the process of moving things several times. I would have like to taken tools outside and then brought them in as they were ready to …

I'll tell ya something, you don't know what you have till you clean the old shop up! I am stripping out my cabinets of supplies, the finishing supplies cabinet, the hardware cabinet, the spray gun cabinet, and I forgot I had half of what I am seeing! Not too mention I am coming across items I forgot I had, yet I went to the big box store to buy anyway, I am finding 3 of the same items simply because I either forgot I had them or could not find them, and I went and bought another. Right now I am going through the finishing supplies stuff, about a dozen Minwax cans that must be 8 years old, since I don't use Minwax anymore they are old and crusty, going into the trash. I …

Helping Our Website Viewers John, I am not sure where to post this suggestion/comment so I put it in each of the forums. If this isn’t permissible, please delete it. Hey folks, thought I’d pass along an experience I had today. Our neighbor, who lives across the street, dropped by to chat. They are new to the neighborhood (about a year) and we are getting to know them better each day. We knew that our neighbor is a marathoner. In fact, she was in the Boston race when the bomb went off. Fortunately, she was not injured. We also knew she is losing her sight. She has three young sons and she is going blind, tragic. Her sight was the reason for her visit. Sometime b…

Yesterday I was driving about a mile west of me when I saw an older gentleman putting this out by the road. It's a Cabboose Stove made by the Excelsior Stove Co. of Quincy Ill. Since my shop is a converted 24' trailer, this should be just about perfect. It needs a little work, the top is broke by the chimney pipe, and the doors are rusted shut. I got the lower draft door working today after a few hours in the electrolysis tank.

After being in my shop in downtown Springfield for a little over a year I've moved again. I'd made connections with Oesterlen Services for Youth and they kept asking me to move to their campus so I could work more with their residential kids. I finally gave in and made the move. They had an extra building that they weren't using so we are trying to get program going to give the kids some introduction to some vocational skills. There are two larger areas where I am setting up my main wood working room with the machines, and another area we will use for wood storage and probably some finishing. Down another hallway are smaller rooms which used to be dorm rooms. I'll …