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Creating a wood working shop |
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Written by jema
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Page 1 of 2 Many of us will have gaped in amazement at the New Yankee Workshop, and probably have come to the conclusion that wood working, whilst a wonderful activity, is well out of reach.
I'd like to take you through what I have done, to create what you might call a poor man's New Yankee Workshop.
With the low prices for which you can now get quite decent power tools, it can be quite affordable, and suddenly no end of simple projects will be far more possible.
Basic work area and tools for your workshop
Norm from the New Yankee Workshop may have a hundred different power tools and accessories. We will have to make do with a lot less. The question is, what tools are the most essential? I will leave out the need for hand saws, hammers, screwdrivers, electric drill etc - I expect everyone to have a few essentials already. Not least plenty of clamps!
The key question and the one which may stop people before they start is space. A standard sheet of MDF/chipboard/plywood is 2.4m x 1.2m and for a lot of practical jobs you need to be able to deal with this.
I am using a single garage, actually a very small single garage of the type that makes you think the house builders anticipated the development of the Sinclair C5 and expected it to be universally adopted.
As such I don't have the native room to deal with this size of sheet, unless that is I align things, so I can open the garage door to create temporary manouvering room. This is indeed what I have done.
Let's take a minute to talk about shop safetyI won't patronise here, but if you are only used to fairly pedestrian tools, you may not appreciate the amount of dust and shrapnel a benchsaw and some other power tools can create. I wear large glasses; if you don't then please invest in a good pair of safety goggles. If dealing with MDF in particular, then use tools with dust bags and attach a wet and dry vacuum cleaner to your bench saw.
The work benchBefore we can do anything, we need a place or places to work. I have an old oak work bench that came with the house.
But this is not enough space to manipulate anything large. My solution is my old dining room table, itself from a car boot sale. This has had clamped to it, a sheet of 18mm MDF.
The picture shows the first "clever bit" in creating a practical workshop, when you don't have all the room in the world. I have built a secondary plynth that sits on the work bench and has been made to be at exactly the same height as the bench saw.
This arrangement allows support for sheets of wood as they are sawn with the benchsaw, or conversely you can saw a sheet with the circular saw if the sheet is placed on both the plynth and the benchsaw.
You can see the benchsaw is held in place with bolts, and there are spare bolt holes. All the tools that need a stable base are first mounted onto sheets of 18mm mdf, and bolt holes cut to align with the work bench holes, allowing them to be swapped in and out as needed.
So on to the actual tools.
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