Hopefully you can follow my craziness. I think i'll only have about $10k to spend on tools after my 3rd stall shop is built. I was originally thinking of getting a nice sliding table saw around $6-10k, but after thinking more about it and discussing with Sam Blasco, he suggested maybe getting a nice bandsaw instead, $5-6k. This may leave me with funds to buy a nice lathe. I've never turned a bowl before, but I bet i'd be hooked. I want to get into turning and making small stuff like cutting boards, cheese trays (I'm from Wisconsin, we love cheese), ect.


I'm building a new shop and need to build lots of base cabinets and cupboards/shelves for the shop AND finishing my basement with a wet bar(2021-2022), some laundy room cupboards and possibly redoing my kitchen SOMEDAY.

total i estimate somewhere around 40-60 linear feet of base cabinets and 30-60 linear feet of cupboards, (I haven't taught myself to be fluent in metric speak yet, lol).

I currently own a crappy ryobi table saw and a festool 55 tracksaw with 3 different tracks, nice miter saw and dewalt planer. I originally was thinking of buying a sliding table saw to help make all these cabinets (and other wood working of course), but I started reading about torsion box workbenches with MFT style bench dog grid holes in them and I started to think......

I know this will be a ton slower than a sliding table saw, but......
What if I set up a grid on a 50"x98" workbench to make consistent cuts that I will be repeating in making these cabinets. Say 600mm and 800mm for the larger side and back panels (that i can't cut on a bandsaw), some other consistent sized dimensions for the drawer bodies, ect? If I did this, i wouldn't need the sliding table saw to cut up the large panels, and I could have consistent sized pieces for all the cabinet carcuses/drawers (i'll figure out the doors later) because the benchdog grid will allow me to make consistent repeatable cuts.

I'm not even sure the bandsaw would be needed to make the carcuses, but would come in handy with the doors, wood turning and cheese tray stuff.

I plan to find a local woodworker that will show me a few things about turning and let me play a bit before I dive into that world.

What do you guys think?

Anybody have a full sized mft style table to break down 4x8 sheet goods instead of using a table saw or sliding table saw?

Anybody enjoying just using a bandsaw and tracksaw, and don't even use a table saw?