Tour of my shop

[Phil Thien]

I'm sorta hesitant to post this. I've drooled over some of the shop tours here. Some of you have multiple tools that are each more expensive than all the tools in my shop combined.

But I finished painting my floor and a couple guys said let's see the shop, so here goes.


This is a picture of my basement shop when you first enter from coming 'round the stairs.

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I guess the table saw is the heart of many shops, and mine is no different. Mine is the saw that many love to hate, the venerable Ryobi BT-3000. I've made some changes to my saw: I ditched the sliding miter table and replaced it with with a shop-made miter slot. The miter slot extension hangs past the front rail, making use of extra-large cutoff sleds easy. In this configuration I can easily manage cross-cutting 24" pieces. I plan on making a newer, wider extension in the future to provide more support to the left for larger pieces.
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My router table is built into the right-hand side of the saw. I use the saw's fence as a router fence, too. I use the Jessem FX router lift with a DeWalt DW618 motor. The motor is located in a shop-made down-draft box for dust collection.

04_router_table.jpg 05_router_table_downdraft.jpg


This is my Inca 410 jointer/planer. It has 8-5/8" wide knives, but relatively short infeed/outfeed. The planer head hangs above my head. To switch to thicknessing I only have to remove the jointer fence and install the thicknessing head. It is a pretty fast switch-over.

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This is my Ryobi 16/32 drum sander. I purchased the unit used from a forum member elsewhere. I think I paid about $400, which is certainly higher than others have paid. I had to de-rust/repaint the stand. The bottom shelf holds my blade garage for my table saw blades. Behind that are some sharpeners. I would like to eventually replace the steel stand with a wood cabinet on casters. This is the heaviest tool in my shop, being able to roll it around would be a blessing.

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[Phil Thien]

This is my Ryobi 12" drill press. It replaces a much nicer Ryobi 16" model that I broke. This unit shares the same type of Reeves drive, but also has a digital speed display my previous unit lacked. I replaced the chuck with a keyless unit from Llambrich (Spain) and the resulting combination works great.

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This is my Skil HD3640 10" bandsaw. It has a 1/2-HP motor, 7" resaw height, and is plenty of saw for me. It is bolted to my bench. I have resawed very hard woods at the full height and it does get the job done, but isn't super-fast. But faster than you might think. I paid $100 for this saw (and got a fun afternoon off to drive to Madison to pick it up). The blade guard (normally zinc plated) was rusty but the rest of the saw had zero rust. I stripped the guard's plating, painted it safety red, added some urethane tires, and have been very pleased with the saw since then.

On the other side of the bench on a bracket that hangs from a stretcher is my Ridgid oscillating belt sander. It is okay. I don't think I've loved this thing as much as many people seem to love theirs. I sometimes think I would have preferred a disc sander.


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Next is dust collection. The far corner of the shop holds my separator and my Ridgid shop vac. YES, this is all I use for machine collection. All my machines have 2.5" dust ports. The table saw, router table, bandsaw, all of them. Actually, my hand sanders and biscuit joiner have 1" ports. So really this is ideal for me.

The shop is plumbed with the 2.5" clear kits. I have blast gates for all the tools. It is all secured above head. The DC piping basically follows the same "L" shape of the shop, and is attached to a big steel beam that runs down the center of the basement, and then connects to some strut that follows a floor joist over to the corner where the separator is located.

My current separator is a 30-gallon plastic drum I stumbled into. This particular plastic seems less problematic when it comes to static.

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[Phil Thien]

Here is my LVL workbench. I built the base from a single piece of LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber). I built this a few years ago, so it may be the first LVL workbench ever.

Well the base, at least. The top is a SC slab door. There is also a middle support to keep the center of the door from sagging. This is a rock-solid bench, the door has been kept nice and flat. The LVL is painted with porch paint. LVL is, IMHO, ugly and has to be painted. On the bench are my bandsaw, a small air compressor, and my Ridgid sander hangs off the stretcher on the other side.

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Here is some hanging storage. I basically screwed some two-by material between joists on top of the block wall. Each of the units has one-by pieces of wood with rafter hooks on the end that hook-over the two-by material.

The left unit has stuff I use near the bench. The two right units have stuff I need towards the other side of the shop. One of these holds my drill bits, router bits, and some other tooling.

16_storage_left.jpg 17_storage_right.jpg

I hung a French cleat to the wall on the other side of the stairs and I'm adding cabinets for general storage for the shop and the wife. As you can see, I need to settle on a finish I like. I didn't like the red oak on the right. It was material I ended up with somehow. I prefer the painted cabinets.

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That is about it. Still have more work to do, but at least I'm mostly (99%) done with screwing-around with concrete and can cut wood.

[Alan Schaffter]

Looks fine to me! You have enough tools to build just about anything you want. Besides it is not what is there, it is what you do there that matters.

For much of my adult life I had nothing more than a Shopsmith (does a bunch of stuff, none of it well), a tiny parasitic 4" SM jointer, some hand-me-down hand tools and low-end Black & Decker and Skill powered hand tools, all crammed into an extra bedroom at first, then into a tiny 12' X 12' shop.

[Aaron Berk]

So let me get this right, Phil Thien........

As in, THE Phil Thien?

Dude your shop rocks, with what you've contributed to the WW world it doesn't mater what your shop is stocked with.

And I've got a BT-3000 parked right next to my 5hp cabinet saw, and they both get used. Allot

I love the LVL, and the fresh floor paint looks stellar.
The previous owner of my hose painted my garage floor, he did a lousy job. I need to repaint before I sell the place.

[Paul McGaha]

Phil,

Like your shop a lot. Very clean and well organized.

I saw your post about dealing with the old ceiling, walls, and floor. The improvements you made look really good..

Thanks for sharing, I really like shop tours.

PHM

[Dave MacArthur]

Thanks for the shop tour Phil. I got some ideas from you for organization, I like that chisel/drill cabinet. I just finished mortising a double-door for hinges and striker plates and vertical lock, and WOW is my place messy... I couldn't find where I set my chisels down after 30 seconds, and had to clamp the door to my table saw extension table. I need to buckle down and do some organizing like that!

[Bas Pluim]

My current separator is a 30-gallon plastic drum I stumbled into. This particular plastic seems less problematic when it comes to static.

You should consider making a baffle for your separator. It really helps keeping more dust/ shavings in the can, and keeps your filter cleaner. Just a thought.

[Bob Riefer]

Thanks for posting this Phil, I really liked reading and checking the pics. Your shop looks great to me! Also, when we all get crazy freaked out about dust collection, it's reassuring to see a setup like yours working well for you. (this is not meant to say that having 6" pipes and mega horsepower and cyclones are "bad", I just mean that for many of us, less of a setup is still a positive and worthwhile upgrade to just letting dust fly).

[Joe A Faulkner]

Excellent Tour and excellent job on the remodel of your space. I am over a year into my remodel, and not looking anywhere close to as organized and neat as your shop. The only project I've managed to come close to completing once I started the shop remdoel is my Thien "top hat" build. The "hat" has been done for several weeks (6" version" - now I'm working on building a plenum with 6 shop-built blast gates and inlet ports. Hope to join you in posting a tour once that is done, but progress is slow.

[Neil Brooks]

It's a great looking shop, Phil, filled with smart tool choices.

I'm a bike rider. The greatest bike racer of all times was Eddy Merckx.

The old saying goes ... Eddy could win on MY bike, but I couldn't win on his.

Meaning ... it ain't so much about the shop ... as it is about the person using it

But I DO love the shop tours, so ... thanks !

[Phil Thien]

Joe, my refurb dragged on for a long time. I just decided to spend whatever time I could, when I could. Thirty minutes was better than nothing. In fact, the floor grinding happened about twenty minutes at a time before and after work for about two weeks. Eventually it gets done.

Neil, that is a fantastic quote.

I'm not sorry my tools are on the lower-end of the spectrum. There are some great advantages:

(1) They don't weigh much, so I can move them around myself or with a little help from one of my kids or my wife. Even without having mobile bases. Being able to unbolt my bandsaw from the bench and walk around with it has its advantages, such as a summer ago when I took it out to the garage for a project assist for a neighbor. My wife and I have a sort of agreement that we won't buy things that the two of us can't manage ourselves. This after the giant CRT TV debacle of years ago.

(2) I think if I purchased expensive, top-of-the-line tools that I'd feel obligated to use them a lot more, and justify them by immediately generating Krenovian type output.

(3) I like to tinker with things, and at this price point, tinkering helps tremendously.

(4) It doesn't seem to diminish my ability to do some decent work. I don't think people would be able to look at any of the things I've built and figure I made them with a $300 Ryobi table saw instead of a $2000 Unisaw.

The durability of the tools isn't always great. So you do have to be careful with them.

[Bob Riefer]

Phil, when I took my woodworking course, the instructor had a range of equipment from lower end through extremely high end. He took the worst lumber in the pile, and purposely made mistakes throughout, and then used his worst equipment to save his piece. His piece still turned out twice as nice as the next best one in the class.

[Alan Schaffter]

(3) I like to tinker with things, and at this price point, tinkering helps tremendously.

Amen to that. There are few few upper end tools that can benefit from a little tinkering too!

[Dave Anderson NH]

And you are "ashamed" why Phil? Your shop is well organized, perfectly serviceable, and obviously the tools meet your needs. The far more important things are the creativity, brains, and the skills of the woodworker. A sledgehammer is not needed to kill a gnat. It looks like you are set up just fine. Enjoy your shop and do the important stuff, making things.