(Last update January 2004, with news on the Miter Saw Station)
For the past few months, I've been building a small wood shop in my basement. It's nowhere near as gleaming-white and advanced as Norm Abram's, and I don't think I'll ever use it to produce anything as fine as the Greene brothers' homes. But it is mine, and I'm proud of what I've been able to do so far.
I've made some changes to the shop over the past few months.
Well, here it is. (We're looking towards the rear of the house.) The combination of fluorescent lights and the low resoution of my camcorder makes this place look pretty dismal, but it's not.
Here's how I built the place, in general terms. The first job was to run a line of 2x4 studs along the wall. After that, I built a plywood frame, roughly 4" high, along the floor upon which the cabinets rest. This frame was needed because the floor of my basement slopes towards the front of the house, and I needed to keep the work area level. So, the toekick area under the cabinets is maybe four inches, while towards the front of the house (close to that lumber rack on the left), it's more like 5.5" to 6".
Once
I got the levelling plywood frame done, I started work on the cabinet/workbench
structures. They're very simple: the vertical boards are plywood, the base is
a four-by-two-foot piece of plywood, and the fronts are just strips of plywood.
Very simple, and I mass-produced the components so that I could throw together
four individual cabinet-units pretty quickly. Notice that only the two middle
units-- the ones flanking the router table, in the middle-- have drawers completed.
The nearest and furthest units don't haven'em yet. (I'm wondering if I really
needed sixteen feet of cabinets, so I may disassemble one, and hold the parts
in reserve.)
This photograph also illustrates the plan for the electrical system. As many craftsmen and college students know, you can never have too many plugs. So the cabinets were designed to allow for a "modular" electrical system. You see, while each cabinet unit is mounted on a 4-foot wide piece of plywood, the cabinet unit itself is three-foot-six inches wide. This gave me three inches on each side-- and when two cabinets are next to one another, it create six-inch-wide areas into which I can mount electrical outlets, dust collection ports, or whatever makes sense.
Well, I'd misjudged the dust collection port sizes, so now those six-inch-wide areas just hold the outlets. I've recently installed an electrical sub-box with two circuits, so now the outlets have power.
Just under the white brackets on the wall, I've run tubing for a dust collection system. The tubing's sold by Woodcraft, and it's powered with a Crasftsman shop-vac. It's even got a remote control. Many woodworking places sell remote-control circuits for dust systems, but Kmart sells a remote-control outlet for Xmas tree lights for about twelve bucks. So, now when I run one of the big machines, I just take out this object the size of a car's electronic keychain, and the dust vac starts up. Neat and cheap.
The ceiling above the workshop area is just Tyvek, stapled to the joists. I just wanted to keep the dust from the upper floor from dropping through, and Tyvek also protects against drafts.
These photos were taken while the shop was being renovated in a big way, for the miter saw station, so it;s messier than usual.
These two pictures show what was going to be a Docking Station in greater detail. The general idea was to have a place where I could place a router table, a bandsaw, a chop saw, a drill press, or whatever, and use the rest of the workbench as a really large work surface. The station would enable me to align the tool's tabletop with the rest of the workbench.
Well, for several months, this spot in my shop was just a router table station. My router's a Porter-Cable 690, and the table's a P-C make as well. You'll notice that I built a plywood table extension around the P-C's original, so give me a bigger work surface-- nice idea, but it's still tough to rout on big pieces of wood that tip past the edge. I still haven't worked out how to incorporate the miter gauge slot into my "flush-with-the-rest-of-it" theory.
This
Christmas, I bought myself a Makita sliding compound miter saw, and spent some
time building a wheeled cart for it. And this now required a redesign of the
Docking Station idea.
The photo at the right shows the Miter Saw Cart in its current, still-incomplete-yet-functional stage. As you can see, the cart is another example of how plywood makes wonderful rectangles. It stands on a set of casters which I got at Woodcraft: the ones you can't see are fixed-direction, while the one in the front are lockable swivel casters, so when I wheel the thing about I can lock it into place.
(The wooden frame in the middle of the cart?The one with the drawer slides on the sides? Ignore that. That's just a test fitting for the drawers I'll be building. Drawer slides are a pain, especially if the cabinets aren;t always the same width for their full depth.)
Okay, so you've probably noticed that the miter saw itself is resting on a small box on top of the actual cart. Why don't we have a closer look at that? (Yes, I did use a wide-angle lens.)
You
see, the workshop isn't a perfect construction, and it would have been very,
very difficult to build the cart so that the surface of the saw would be level
with the workshop's work surfaces. So I needed to be able to adjust the height
of the saw a little.
The plywood box has four adjustable-height legs inside. If you look closely, you'll see large holes at the corners, where I can insert a screwdriver and adjust the heights, and make each side flush that way. So: the miter saw's bolted to the box, which rests in a shallow "pan" on top of the cart. (This also enables me to remove the miter saw if I want to.)
In
this photo, I've wheeled the cart out of the way, to show how I've rebuilt the
docking station. For one thing, I've had to widen it out to make room for the
wider footprint of the miter saw and cart. I also made edges which angle in
towards the rear, which forces the cart to settle into the same location with
maybe a quarter inch of play. (I'm probably going to put in an identical set
higher up in the station, for stability.)
You will notice that, on the sides of the docking station, I've attached pairs of those framing brackets which hold 2x4s. I plan on making a table-top section (perhaps with those dog-holes I mentioned earlier, maybe a vise), and if I put 2x4s across the bottom they can simply drop into those brackets.
I had to make room for the rear extension of the sliding compound miter saw. That large white area at the top is just a large sheet of Tyvek, which I staplegunned into a large rectangular area I'd taken out of the wall.
Now that I have a docking station that's properly sized for a wide-base tool, I can start planning for other items. The docking station's an easy width to work with (two feet wide, plus an inch and a half for the plywood sides), so building more carts isn't a problem. Next on the agenda is the router table: I haven't decided whether to build a shorter cart to hold my Porter-Cable router table, or to build a router table of my own and maybe blow some serious cash on one of those high-end router fence systems.
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)