woodworking shop near me
“+10,000 Step By Step Plans …even if you don’t have a large workshop or expensive tools!“ Click Here 👈
Transcript
The Wood Whisperer is sponsored by Titebond. Woodworkers love shop tours. I mean, even if the person’s shop isn’t exactly like yours, there’s almost always some little idea that you can pilfer and bring into your own shop space. And for most woodworkers, the shop is almost a project in and of itself and its ever evolving. We’re always looking to improve. So with that in mind, we recently asked for submissions for shop tours and you guys really came through and I want to thank every single one of you that sent one in, I won’t be able to show all of them. Kind of sucks because there were some really good ones in there, but we’re gonna do our best to organize them into categories and if you guys really like this, we can do more in the future. But a sincere thank you to everybody who sent in a shop tour really appreciate it. Now today I’m going to show you a few shops that I’m classifying as small. Of course everybody has their own idea of what actually comprises a small shop, but these were the smallest of the group that was sent to me. So it was natural to kind of organize them together under the small shop label. So the first one we have here is from a dude named Chris in New Zealand. Now Chris’ shop is about 225 square feet in a one car detached garage, let’s check it out. [Chris] Hey Mark, my name is Chris and welcome to my workshop. It’s a single car garage and when we first moved here we did try and put the car in there, but I kept buying tools and eventually the car didn’t fit. So my workshop’s kind of organized in a semi circle fashion with my table saw pointing out the door and go around the outside. Start off I’ve got a small linisher and a grinder for sharpening my chisels. I managed to pick up this great benchtop drill press for peanuts, I was pretty stoked with that. Just recently bought myself a Triton router. So I’m gonna be trying to build myself a router table at some point soon. This is really where my woodworking and tool obsession came from. When we first moved into the house, there was a lot of DIY to be done and my compound sliding miter saw was just the workhorse of all of that. I’ve only just recently actually recessed into the bench for the longest time. It pretty much sat on some sawhorses. Another recent acquisition bought myself a spindle sander. Haven’t used it a whole lot yet, but when I have, it’s been super handy, A few bits and bobs on my part of my french cleat wall, I find it quite relaxing working out how to build little cabinets to house your bits and pieces. So all of these are just french cleat containers that have put together. Over here, we’ve got a small band saw which has been invaluable another quite inexpensive purchase from a friend who was looking to get rid of it. Over here we’ve probably got one of my most favorite tools and this is my lathe and this is probably where my hobby woodworking began. I bought this on a whim and joined the North Shore wood turners guild and they taught me a whole lot and I really enjoyed it and spent far too much money on lathes equipment and tools. Then I have several of my cordless battery operated things up here and then the rest is really just french cleat walls. There’s a dado jig that I pretty much watched one of your videos to, to make that one. This is one of my most recent purchases. It is a jointer planer, so it’s a transformer one obviously can’t fit a big thicknesser and planer in here. So I got this all in one job which is quite nice. Over in the corner, my pretty lackluster dust extraction and finally my table saw, which by necessity has to point out the door there because there’s no room to out feed wood, but it works so I can just open the door up and I’ve got that extra room there. And then my latest creation has been this workbench, relatively simple in construction compared to some of them that you can make, but I’m pretty darn happy with it and it’s really made it a lot easier to work on things in here. Well that’s a wee insight into my workshop. Hope you found that interesting. Um, it’s not the biggest one in the world, but it does what I need. There’s not a lot of huge things I, I want to buy left. I want to get myself a new track saw. If I was to fix anything in the garage and be the concrete that’s come crumbling, I’m not entirely sure how to deal with that, but otherwise I’m, I’m pretty lucky and pretty blessed to have such a great creative space. And the amount of bits and pieces I’ve been able to fix and build around the home is I think it’s probably paid for most of the tools. Maybe…at least that’s what I tell my wife anyway. [Marc] Well don’t worry, Chris, your secret is safe with us. I love that what got Chris deeper into the craft was the miter saw and home projects. That’s exactly how I started. I had my stepdad’s craftsman miter saw, we did a flooring project. That was my first real power tool where I discovered that blades need to be sharp. It’s quite a learning lesson. And then from there the bug for woodworking just kind of developed. So hey, Chris, thank you so much for sending that in great job with the shop. Now let’s jump to another continent and go to Washington state to see Ben’s shop, which is about 250 square feet and it’s the single car portion of a larger garage. [Ben] Hello, my name is Ben. Welcome to my shop here in Woodinville Washington. I have one bay of a three car garage. So while I’m very thankful to have the space, it does present some challenges because I don’t have a lot of place to push tools up against. So I don’t have a real workflow set up here. But I kind of have a home for everything. So of course the table saw is in the middle and then the miter saw is here on the side. It’s a little awkward because I’m right handed and the measuring tape comes out this side but I just open up the garage door if I ever need a little more space. I haven’t figured out where to put a full dust collector yet. So for now I just have the shop vac and a cyclone and then I run the hoses. I have extra hoses up here and I just attach them on whenever I need to run them to a tool. Honestly it works pretty well for everything except the planer, even the table saw does okay if I’m not using a dado stack. I do have one special drawer here. You open it up. It’s a full length drawer and it’s got a bunch of scraps in it. So anything that fits in here, this is what I limit myself to scraps if it fits in here I can keep it otherwise it goes in the trash. This bottom drawer used to be full of half used bags of screws and random nuts and bolts. But I recently got a 3D printer and I’ve been using a system called Gridfinity to make perfectly sized bins to hold all of these different supplies. And so now I can have a chance at finding what I need and I can just pull them out and they fit back into the grid really easily so they don’t slide around too much in the drawer and I can just print more as I get more stuff. This is how I store my CNC machine. I don’t have any room to keep it flat so I folded it up against the wall. I was nervous that it might get out of calibration a lot. But I’ve had it for years and this hasn’t caused me a problem. So I just fold it down when I need it and it works well. Just have a little bench top joiner which isn’t great. But I can move it out whenever I need to use it and then my planer sits down here on this little roller system. I said I don’t have dust collection for it. So I kind of just give up and I just roll it somewhere and know that I’m gonna make a mess and it’s okay. I just clean it up when I’m done. Well that’s the end of the nickel tour of my shop. I hope you found something that inspires you to get out there and make something. [Marc] Now in Ben’s shop, there were really two things that stood out to me. First of all was the dust collection setup. Not everybody has the space budget or desire to set up a big cyclone. And he’s basically got a dust collection system built from a shop vac in a separate cyclone separator and then a bunch of different hoses. That’s fantastic and it’s working for him so you can’t beat that. The other thing is the CNC. CNC has really come down in price and if you’ve got a small shop and a smaller budget, sometimes those smaller units can be fit into a small shop space if you’re clever about it. And that fold down solution is just awesome. Great job Ben, thanks for sending in the shop tour. And finally today we go to Eric in Texas. Eric has a standalone shop that is about 240 square feet. Hey everybody. I’m Eric Richter. I’m in southeast Texas about an hour and a half north of Houston in a town called Beaumont. This is my small shop. It’s about 12 ft wide by 20 ft long and I’ve been woodworking for about four years and still getting this shop organized. But I hope you like what you see. Starting with my table saw, here’s my pretty much brand new saw stop. It’s a one and a quarter horsepower. That’s plenty for my needs. I got the 36 inch fence with the T slide system. I really love it so far. I’ve got a few parallel clamps and mostly just harbor freight clamps that have been working out pretty well for me. I’ve got some overhead lumber storage that keeps my long, flat stuff and right now I’m pretty low on that, but I’ve got a lot of sticks just hiding out in buckets, which is plenty for my storage needs. They’re easy to get out of the way and they don’t take up much room for now. I’ve got a DeWalt flat knife planer which works pretty well for me and I use a harbor freight dust collector that I just have plumbed to my table saw and I run an extra hose for my drum sander and planer at the moment. This is my jointer, it’s just a porter cable, bench top unit and it’s definitely not enough for me, but it’s on a decent stand and I hope to upgrade at some point. On the other side of the room, I’ve got my band saw which is just a 14 inch with the sixth inch re-saw capacity, porter cable and it’s working pretty well. I’ve upgraded the fence with a Kreg system. I’ve got a Wen lathe sitting on a beefy stand with an extension to make about 50 inches, which is incredible. It’s been pretty good for me. Above that I’ve got my shop vac that runs to one of the home depot dust hoppers and that works out pretty well for me. Next up is my drill press which is sitting on a nice bank of drawers which holds a lot of my hardware and drill accessories. I’ve got a rigid oscillating edge sander, spindle sander also sitting on some drawers which holds my sanding supplies. My drills sit right above that, which is pretty accessible for my workbench. I got a Jet 16 to 32 drum standard, that doesn’t see much use. Next to that, I’ve got my router table which is kind of a cut apart Ryobi bench top model that I threw on to shop built cart that sits next to my wall with french cleats that holds all out of my hand tools and screws, hand planes, glue and whatever you have it. I’ve got french cleats around the shop that I am working towards improving and last but not least. I’ve got my workbench which is made up of two by 12, got some dog holes, some storage beneath for my nail guns and sharpening supplies and what have you. Got two cheap vises on here with some sapele and pretty big sliding sections so that I can store stuff underneath but also use it as an outfeed for my table saw so it’s big and chunky and is just enough for me. [Marc] Eric’s shop is a great example of how you can become fully functional in a wood shop without necessarily getting into the really expensive bling brands. Although Eric, I did see a Festool sustainer, know what you’re up to Also, I love his use of the french cleats. If you’re not sure where to go with a storage solution in your shop, putting a couple strips of french cleats across the wall is a great place to get started because then you can add a cleat to anything you want to hang and you can move it anywhere you want. It’s a good solution for people who either need a workshop that changes all the time where you just can’t make up your mind. I actually have an older video on this. If you want to see how to create a french cleat wall and possibly adapt that to your own shop. So I hope you guys enjoyed this and if you did give this video a like, give us a subscribe and let us know in the comments what you like most about these shops. If you tell me you like this, we’ll do more because guess what? I got a whole bunch of these and I really want to show them because people worked hard on these things. So if you like it, let me know, we’ll do more in the future. And of course thank you to everybody who submitted a shop, even if I don’t get the chance to show it, I watch them all and man at the time when I’m putting my shop together, it was a great inspiration to see what you guys are up to. So thank you, everybody. All right, we’ll see you next time. I like the way you move the construction guys are over there jamming out. I like the way you move.