I few years ago, I ponied up the dough for a Festool sander and dust extractor hoping this would take the coughing out of the equation. This system does it’s job admirably and I can even work without a respirator most of the times and just turn on my ambient air cleaner. The problem is that the hose and cord really get in the way and wear you out as the weight of the cord always wants to pull the sander out of your hand. Festool makes a nifty boom arm for their extractors to loft the hose and power cord up out of the way and takes the weight off the sander, but my 7 foot shop ceilings just won’t accommodate it.

So when faced with sanding the Redwood parts for 2 Adirondack chairs and a table, I finally went in search of a solution. It was in my garden shed of all places. I used to hang my mountain bike up in the garage and I have one of those heavy duty rubber coated hooks still laying about. Find a stud in the ceiling near my bench, screw in the hook and problem solved.

Now with the weight of the hose and cord taken off the sander, it just floats over the work piece and does its job like it should. No more sore wrists trying to hold the sander on the benchtop. Surprisingly, this big sanding job just went by without incident.

Of course it was helped along by a Best of Wil Ferrell SNL DVD in the player.

This solution was so simple that I almost hesitated to post it, but I began thinking about all the tiny little creature comforts and time saving tips/devices that we woodworkers implement into our own shops and thought I would share in case anyone else out there is having this problem.

What tiny additions make your woodworking better? Leave a comment and share it with us.

Make sure to check out The Sawdust Chronicles Beginning Woodworker contest. This looks like it will be an exciting contest where you have 30 days to build a new project inspired by an example given by the judges. The build begins on May 1st so get your entry in before then so you can participate in this exciting contest. I hear the prizes are pretty cool!

Enjoy the show!

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I just put the bench to use filming my process for milling stock to thickness using hand tools only. Using some battens and some clamps for stops, I secured a 12/4, 11″ wide, 30″ long piece of Ash to the top and went to work with Scrub and Jack plane to flattened one side.

It was hard work, but very gratifying to put this slab to work after so much work to get it into it’s current state.

It is also nice to see what kind of space the bench will take up and how I can use it in my small shop. With an 8 foot long bench it will just fit along the back wall under the window. I don’t have much room on either side but enough to reach the end vise wheel so it will be functional. Upon starting out on this build I thought that I would probably use the bench more pulled out perpendicular to the back wall so that is how I have it positioned now. No doubt for heavy hand work the bench should take center stage in the shop so I imagine I will be moving it around a lot. The question now though is whether 8 feet is just too long in my small shop. My gut tells me that if it fits, I should keep it at 8 feet because who knows if I will every move to a bigger shop. Taking some measurements and seeing what it would look like to reduce the length to even 7 feet would make a difference, but I think I will end up regretting it in the long run. So I will keep it at 8 feet. I suppose that with the legs set in so far from the ends that I can always shorten one end later if necessary, but I think that would hurt to do it.

Lessons Learned:

Good infeed and outfeed support is essential when jointing/planing long boards
Handplanes make glue ups even easier
Proper planning can save you money
Furniture is furniture whether is lives in your shop or not: don’t sacrifice quality

Enjoy the show!

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I got two of these done before I read a post by Mark (Loogie) on Lumberjocks about the building of Bob’s Bench.

Mark mentioned a technique he was using to keep the individual boards in line with one another to decrease the amount of flattening that would need to be done later. By glueing up the top one piece at a time, he could run a clamp perpendicular to the clamping pressure across the joint thereby clamping the boards into alignment. Any more than 1 board at a time and the thickness would be too great for your average clamp.

While in hindsight this seems pretty obvious, it was a revelation at the time so thank you Mark. I immediately stopped making my sub-assemblies and starting adding one piece at a time. This kept my boards in almost perfect alignment as I started to build the top.

Here’s 3 boards in the clamps

Roll on some more glue and now 4 boards in the clamps

At this point my bench is in 3 pieces. Two 6 inch wide, 3 board assemblies, and one 7 inch wide, 4 board assembly. I had already jointed the 6 inch assemblies and using the new clamping technique had allowed me to form the 4 board assembly almost flat already so I skipped the jointer (mine is only 6″ anyway) and went straight to the planer to flatten completely. This is where the workout really got hairy. I wanted to make sure all 3 of these assemblies were exactly the same width so I could continue to use Mark’s clamping strategy to control the final glue ups since from here on out, only handplanes can tame this massive beast due not only to limitations in machine width capacity, but sheer weight.

With each one of these assemblies weighing in over 50 lbs, I took very light cuts with the planer and made sure I have perfect infeed and outfeed support. This adds a new element of safety to woodworking because dropping one of these would definately break a foot. After breaking a serious sweat making 3-4 passes through the planer with these beauties (don’t worry I got it on film so y’all can laugh at me later) I was at a uniform thickness and flatness all around.

Time to get serious about glue up. I could continue to use Mark’s technique by clamping across the joint on the very ends, but in the middle I would need to make some cauls.

These are just some scrap wood (I’ve got plenty of Ash laying about) covered in packing tape to prevent glue from sticking. I even planed a slight crown to the boards to provide extra pressure in the center of the caul across the joint. Now I could roll on even more glue, and, oooommmfff! Lift a 50 lb assembly on top of another one to make a 7 board glue up.

More glue, heavy lifting, and a hernia later and I had 10 boards glued and clamped.

This is the main bench assembly after I scraped off the glue using my number 80 cabinet scraper. The bench top now measures 4 inches thick, just over 8 feet long, and 19 inches wide.

It’s enough to bring a woodworker to tears. Just gazing out over the sea of laminated Ash! OK no more waxing poetic! Next I’ll flush up the ends using the same technique I used to cut the bottoms of the legs by cutting with a circular saw from both side and evening the face out with a flush trim bit in the router. I will keep the bench at this width to lay out the cavity for the end vise, then I can add the dog block and final laminations to bring the bench to around 26 inches.

I need to go rest my muscles now!

Not that I haven’t loved getting to know my handplanes better over the last month of hand flattening boards on the Roubo, but being able to flatten a face and edge quickly with the power jointer is a nice advantage when dealing with so much lumber. The handplanes will definately stay close by since my jointer is only 6″ wide and hand flattening a board is just way too much fun!

A special thanks goes out to Rick3ddd over at Lumberjocks for giving me the tip to shim my outfeed table instead of my infeed table. Considering he repairs machinery professionally I figured he was a trusted source.

I did my best to capture this entire process on film but I am sure I missed something. Please let me know if any questions come up from this episode.

The blog of the week is Parings, Chuck Bender’s blog. Take a peek into the mind of a master period craftsman and be amazed. You can find his site here. Also be sure to check out his class schedule and take advantage of his wealth of knowledge by taking a class.

Enjoy the show!

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Well today I struck a blow for all those small workshop woodworkers making due with our paltry collection of small tools by adding something to my shop that Norm doesn’t have.

Everybody say hi to Frank Klausz! My wife gave me this beautiful LCD/DVD combo TV specifically for my shop this Christmas. After doing some shopping for wall mounts and a few minutes of install time I was off to the races. It has a great picture and now I can watch my woodworking DVDs in my shop either as background noise or to aid me in some step by step work. It has all the input ports too so that I can run my iPhone or iPod through it and watch all the video podcasts that have been accumulating in iTunes.

For the safety nuts out there, please realize that I won’t be watching TV while working at the table saw and I promise I will pay attention to the work at hand. I think this addition will be particularly great for playing how to videos while I work like Cosman’s dovetail video or any turning video while standing at the lathe.

If nothing else, I can pull up one of my Windsor chairs and a beer and just watch TV in my favorite room in the house! Now I just need a dust cover to protect it when not in use.

I admit I am a jig sharpener. I never learned to sharpen freehand and have gotten proficient enough with the jigs that I probably never will. In between projects though, I will use the Veritas jig on the Shaptons to get the mirror polish.

For my carving chisels I could use my Tormek, but there are some specialty jigs that I do not have yet and instead I freehand sharpen these tools on the WorkSharp using the slotted wheel. I also have some ceramic slipstones in various shapes to pull off the burr on the fluted side of the chisels. I use these ceramic stones to sharpen my chip carving knives too. I use either the strop wheel on the WorkSharp or my Butz strop to polish to a mirror finish on the carving chisels. Lately though I only use the Butz strop (for those who don’t know this is just leather on a wood board) when I am away from the shop like last August when I was carving in Maine on vacation. The power strop on the WorkSharp is just too slick to pass up.

As I mentioned in the last podcast, I stick to the Tormek for my turning tools. I do hone them on the leather strop wheel and mostly stick to that while turning. For instance, if I am turning pens, I mostly work with a roughing gouge so I set up the jig and keep it out so that in seconds I can freshen the edge and get back to work. Jigs allow for exact repeatability and instant results!

So will all this paraphenalia you can imagine that I had to put a lot of thought into my sharpening station and how and why to store things. I took a look at the scrap I had in the shop and came across some 2×10 construction lumber left over from tearing out my old counter tops. So some resawing and planing later, I came up with this design:

A simple cabinet on wheels with a laminate top and ample overhang if I need to clamp anything in place. I added the bench vise for sharpening card scrapers or eventually saws once I can figure out how to do that (Woodworking in America!)

Down below I store the Tormek (although it seldom leaves the counter top) and the WorkSharp along with a spray bottle for water stones, and a gallon jug of distilled water for the Tormek reservoir. I laid laminate on the bottom, partly to catch any water drops from the Tormek and partly because I had some left over so why not???

There is still plenty of room for growth in this lower cabinet and I went ahead and drilled shelf pin holes to allow the addition of adjustable shelves when the need arises. The four drawers are sorted into functions. The top left drawer is the most accessed since that is where my Tormek jigs are. I am left handed so why not put it on the strong side. There is also room for growth here as well if I decide to buy more jigs for carving tools. I know that all of the Jet sharpener jigs work on the Tormek too so I might look over there and see if something is useful. Some day I may put in dividers but for now it won’t hurt the jigs to be loose. In the small plastic container is the maintenance kit with wire brush, sharpie marker, and small first aid kit.

On the top right is the next most sought after drawer with my stones, files, Veritas jig, burnisher, strops, and honing compound. I also have a small piece of a rubber yoga matt that I lay out on the top to put the stones on. This keeps them from moving around while I sharpen. One day I may build a small holder that I can put them in but for now this works fine. The beauty of the Shapton stones is that they are not stored in water, but rather sprayed before use. This prevents me having to keep a stone pond around for soaking. It can also get cold in the shop in the winter if I turn off the space heater and frozen stones in water will break.

The bottom right drawer is my reference drawer. This is where I keep my Tormek DVD and instruction book. I also have the sharpening Bibles: The Complete Guide to Sharpening by Leonard Lee, and Taunton’s Sharpening by Thomas Lie-Nielsen. Finally all of the little pamphlets that come with your tools that have care and sharpening tips go in this drawer.

The bottom left drawer is really overflow in the design. For now I have my extra glass wheels and sandpaper for my WorkSharp in there. I am probaby going to build a base for the WorkSharp that will hold all the extras. This drawer suffices for now until more gear needs the space.

No sharpening station is complete without great lighting so I mounted a goose neck lamp on the top.

The lamp has an interchangeable base that mounts on a wall or a flat surface. I have the wall mount on the wall above my where my bench will go. You just lift the black clasp and the whole gooseneck assembly lifts off to move to a new location. On the back side of the cabinet below the countertop is a power strip as well.

I always keep a roll of paper towells handy while sharpening as well as a few rags to wipe off surface and check scratch patterns. For now I will keep those in the bottom cabinet. Other features to note that went into the design are:

Height: designed to be tall enough so that my 6’4″ frame doesn’t have to stoop to examine edges. A happy coincidence it that I can sit on my shop stool and sharpen easily too.
Counterspace: I wanted the top to be big enough to hold the Tormek and something else like the stone set up or WorkSharp. Since I use multiple tools to sharpen any one edge tool, this way I am not putting things away to make room. The top is 24″ deep and 40″ wide.
Mobility: There are 4 heavy duty locking swivel casters on the bottom to allow me to move the station wherever I need it.

I couldn’t be happier with the design of this set up. It suits all of my substantial and varied needs to tackle any edge tool. As a happy side effect once I put all the tools away I have a very nice size assembly table too. I actually used it to assemble the bridle joints for the cabinet doors. In my mind you can’t ask more of a design than one that meets all your planned needs, has room for future, unknown needs, and accidentally services ancillary needs.

OK, now you have seen it. Hit me with your questions about why or how I did something. Let me know if you have sharpening questions. I am not the Zen sharpening master, but I have tackled most edges and now am equipped to tackle them in style.

I also talk about the latest Pop Wood magazine and some ideas brought up by readers and listeners about making hand planes and lathe projects for the show.

Finally I mention several links throughout the show:

Bridge City Toolworks Commemorative Tool #15

Khalaf Oud Luthiery: Getting to Know Roubo

Popular Woodworking’s Greene & Greene online extra

Workbench Magazine’s shop planning tool

Here is a link to Amazon for “Hand Tool Essentials” one of my favorite books

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Here are some pictures of my shop and a short video that will help to illustrate what I have done and my vision for the future.

This is a series of pictures moving from the front at the garage door towards that back wall showing the original fixed cabinets.

You can see that I am really limited on flexibility with all these fixed cabinets. Great storage space, but no room for a bench. Check out this video on the current state of things.

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My philosophy on shop furniture varies depending on how anxious I am to get on to my next project. Most of the time I use these shop projects as a practice session to try out new techniques. My drill press cart that was completely recently was one example:

Here I cut all the tongue and groove joinery for the frame and panels using just a saw and shoulder plane. I cut all the panel grooves using a plow plane, and I hand cut the dovetails that connect the top stretchers to the carcass. It was a fun learning experience and only used scraps that were laying around the shop. In the instance of this sharpening station, I really want to bang it out and move on some other projects. So I decided to built the whole thing using frame and panel again to make use of some 2x construction lumber I have left over from an earlier demolition; however, this time I will use pocket holes for the joinery.

I have the Kreg master kit and I find it to be a great tool. When I first bought it about a year ago, the Woodcraft where I got it was having a special that got me the Bench Klamp system for 50% off when you buy the Master kit. Up until now I haven’t done anything with that bench clamp. Recently I ripped out my old countertops and put in laminate covered MDF for more weight and stability. Now that these are in, I decided it would be good to install the clamping plate. The added bonus being that with all the pocket holes in my sharpening station the assembly will be much faster.

(Are you starting to see where the woodworking A-D-D theme of this site comes from???)

So I built a frame that perfectly fits around the clamp plate and double stick taped the frame down to the countertop where I wanted to install the plate. Using a trim router, I hogged out the laminate and MDF to match the thickness of the plate. Then I used a forstner bit to hollow out the center of the inlay to allow for the bolt that the clamp travels on just like keyhole hanging hardware. Next I had to square up the rounded corners. Normally this is a simple process with a chisel but the added difficulty of laminate made things a little more interesting. That stuff is slick and tough, but eventually I was able to get through it and cleaned up the corners. I fitted the plate and coaxed it into place with a mallet and the fit was great all around the edges. It was a little shallow at the top so I pulled the plate back out and hit the inlay with my router plane to remove that little bit of extra material. Now the plate fits snugly and flush with the counter. I installed the four wood screws at the corners and the clamp was ready to go!

Here it is with the clamp in place.

Finally I put it to the test. Normally when driving the pocket screws, Kreg supplies you with a clamp but you have to have the room to get the clamp under the workpiece and it makes it dicey to line up the pieces and keep them flush. In this instance, I was able to align my rail and stile perfectly and just drop the clamp and was ready to drive the screws.

This will save me a huge amount of time and I can already see other areas where this handy clamp will be very useful. Maybe I’ll buy one or two more now and sit on those for a year before installing them!

I started building smaller pieces as well as some built in bookshelves using these routers to cut my first dado and decorative edges. I discovered ebay as a good source for router bits too.
I put the shelf dados and triple bead edges on these with my routers. The doors I built later once I had a router table.

I also stumbled across The Router Workshop on PBS. This show was a little hokey, but it was amazing to me that these guys built all that stuff using just a router table. I had heard about putting the router in a table, but hadn’t really investigated it. The whole internet revolution was still new at the time so the plethora of information we have at our fingertips now just wasn’t there so PBS ended up filling that void. Long story short, I bought one of their router tables because it seemed like a well constructed solution. This essentially functioned as a bench top router table and it has served me well for over 5 years. However, lately I find myself devising complex workarounds because dragging out the table and setting it up along with having the extra counter/bench space to set it up on has become too time consuming. I have oft longed for a full fledged, dedicated router station, but I have been hesitant to give up the floor space in my one car garage shop. When I recently built a stand for my contractor table saw, I thought about adding a router extension and designed the plans to allow for that future addition.

So about a month ago I embarked on this build knowing that I would have to space it out over some time because I had several projects in process (some of which were actual commissions). I had planned to upgrade to a router lift and I purchased the JessEm Mast-R-Lift from Rockler of course wouldn’t you know that it went on a big sale about a week after I received mine in the mail! I actually put up a blog series on the actual construction of the table top on Lumberjocks in response to a question I had there in the forums. So I will skip over that part here and rely on you all to hit the link and patronize Martin’s fantastic site.

So after getting the table top installed and making some cuts I was overjoyed with how it was working and the complete lack of setup needed to get cutting. The router lift makes my life so much easier. I used this table for my recent flurry of Adirondack furniture builds (10 chairs, 6 footstools, whew!) to round off all the edges on the slats. You can only imagine the pile of sawdust on my floor by the end of that session. I also was missing some of the on board storage that I have with my little bench top model. So I set about designing a cabinet that could function as dust collection and storage for bits and wrenches. I wanted to make sure it was supported well too so that I would not see any table sagging over the years.

First I added some 2×4 angled supports. These are screwed into the underside of the table and to the ash sides. They are bolted to the table saw base.

Now I took some measurements between the supports because I mean to mount the cabinet to the supports rather than to the table top. Here is a dry fit of the carcass:

The top is open and I just ran two ledger strips across the top. I will drive a few screws through this into the table top for alignment purposes, but the weight will be supported by these fittings.

These worked really well because of the tight space inside the cabinet. With the bolts accepting an allen key I was able to squeeze my hand in to hold the key while tightening the assembly.

Next I fitted the door. I had some stereo cabinet hardware hanging around and put it to good use.

I wanted the door to fit as tight as possible so I chiseled out the recess for the hinges.

Since I had the chisels all warmed up I cut out a recess for this jointer dust port that I bought several years ago for another project that I ended up scrapping. I know that the recess is really not necessary. I could have just glued the plate in with some poly glue, but I like my hand tools so what the heck.
Using a marking knife I scribed a line around the port. Then with dividers I marked another rectangle inside that scribed line and cut that out with the jig saw. Now I went back with chisels and chopped the rabbet. Just for fun I smoothed out the rabbeted ledge using my small router plane. Aren’t hand tools fun!

Then I set about making the bit storage drawers. There are spots for 6 drawers. I only cut bit holes in three drawers for now. One of the six drawers is used for storage of insert plates, wrenches, set up bars, etc. The other two I will leave empty for now future growth.

Finally, I set the cabinet in place and shimmed it to height with whatever was laying around the shop. I drilled the 3/8″ holes through the supports and into the cabinet side and bolted the whole thing into place.

At the last minute I decided to cut a hole in the side of the cabinet and mounted this switch that I have had buried in a drawer for 5 years or so. The power cord from the router runs from the main compartment up into the top right storage drawer and plugs into the switch from there. The main power cord runs out the back of the cabinet.

Overall I am really happy with this table. The dust collection works great with suction at the fence and out the bottom of the cabinet. The open top to the cabinet works as inflow for backup air since the door does not have any holes in it. I have plenty of bit storage with lots of room to grow. Finally, all the little accessories have a place to live in the top right drawer. The parting shot is the completed cabinet. You can see that I attached the drawer fronts with screws and then plugged them. I had some of these knobs from another projects so they fit the bill nicely.

I hope you enjoyed my little journey here and it will help you if you ever decide to build one of these.