Voiceover:The Wood Whisperer is brought to you by
Powermatic, the Gold Standard since 1921
and by Rockler Woodworking and Hardware,
Create with Confidence.
(upbeat music)
Marc:Well, hello, everybody.
I'm just enjoying my morning Dunkin Donuts today.
It's a very special Wednesday for us.
I wanted to give everybody a little tour
of the workshop and not the traditional tour.
I want to show you what my workshop
looks like mid project because I think you get
a little bit of an unrealistic perspective
on how a workshop can look if you only see
these beautiful shiny shop photos
so that's part of the reason, reason number one.
And reason number two is this morning I sort of
entered a state of workshop crisis
I guess you could call it.
It's exaggerated a little bit,
but the thing is I look around the shop
and I see so many places where
I can improve on my efficiency
and there's space that's taken up
by things like this for instance.
I've got my turbine at the bottom.
There's some useful tools in here,
things that I don't want to get rid of,
but this whole thing in and of itself takes up
a very valuable amount of space.
One thing I really, really miss about
this current setup in my shop is
having a dedicated router table.
Right now, if you look over here,
my router table is this really awesome
FESTOP thing that goes on top of -
I'll put these over here,
that goes into a Festool MFT/3 table.
It's got a Bench Dog lift in here,
and that's great and all, it works.
The problem is it's just not ideal.
Sharing space with the outfeed space means
I'm constantly converting things back and forth
and this is just not an ideal surface
for, you know, a permanent routing solution.
So I really miss my dedicated routing station.
Well, that would fit right in this spot
if I only had enough room to put it there.
So I'm going to have to figure out a way
to get rid of this, to still maintain all of my tools,
maybe put them in a drawer somewhere,
but I don't need this whole rolling dealywhacker.
I look at all my space along this wall
and I see three cabinets that just -
I guess these are okay, it was a quick solution,
but man, even though I spent like
a couple hundred bucks on each one of these,
this is just cheap garbage.
These are the Coleman cabinets
that you can get at like Lowes.
They're just falling apart.
I mean, they don't stand up to
even a little bit of weight.
So really unhappy with that.
I'm gonna have to build my own.
And up here I've got my Gladiator cabinets.
Now Gladiator makes great stuff.
These things are rock solid.
The problem is they're really expensive
so I'm not about to plunk down the cash
to buy the bottom cabinets to match these tops,
but one thing I'm looking at here
is this top surface is another area that's kind of wasted.
I'm not using it the way I would have expected to use it.
It's just kind of a collection of crap now.
So I have to rethink the strategy there
and moving on down the line,
I've just got more storage that I don't feel
is completely optimized for this shop.
And again, this shop, beggars can't be choosers.
I've got a smaller space here than I used to have
so I have to kinda look around and see what
tools am I not using as often as I thought I would.
Here's a good example over here.
You see what my hollow chisel mortiser is good for?
Holding up lumber.
This space could have been used for something.
The problem is I don't want to get rid of this tool.
Of course, I love this tool.
I just don't use it that often so in a space like this
the question is do I need it?
My lathe is another good example.
The lathe over here.
It's hidden behind the plywood here.
Hopefully you can get an idea.
Beautiful lathe, love this thing.
Every time I turn, I'm in heaven.
The problem is I'm only in heaven a couple times a year.
I don't really use it that often
so if I had an alternative place to either
store it or move it out of the way,
but it's a beast, the thing is hard to move around
so I'm thinking about possibly trying to get
a mobile base or something for it.
Haven't looked into that yet.
My miter station, this is where I do most of my cross cuts.
The problem is I don't have much length to work with
and I don't have an ability to have a
sort of repeated stop setup so every time
I want to make repeated cuts and hook up a stop
I've gotta put on sort of an auxiliary fence
and clamp a block to it and it's makeshift.
It's done that way every single time
so there's nothing that's -
you know, there's no efficiency there at all.
I like this JET saw, nothing wrong with it at all,
very effective, makes a nice clean cut,
but I still have this little guy on the floor, okay,
and I'm honestly torn between which one -
you guys who know how much I love
my Festool stuff will be surprised to hear me say that,
but it's a great saw, but a lot of the features
of the Kapex are features that I'm not really
using to take advantage of
so as far as making simple 45
and 90 degree cuts, my JET does a fine job of that.
But I still want this thing to be used,
so the miter saw solution needs to be worked out.
Obviously, my wood storage solution
needs to be worked out.
I've got my plywood over here,
some cutoffs and things over there,
just not happy with the way those are organized.
The band saw, I kind of like where that is.
That's one thing going for me.
And then on this side, you know, while we're here,
since I am mid project, let me show you this project
and we'll talk about the other side of the shop.
So this is the current project we're
working on in the Guild.
This is a chest of drawers.
You can see it's partially assembled at this point.
I've got a bunch of web frames over here.
I'll bring them over.
The web frames are about to be installed today.
This one'll go on the bottom,
I've got a couple more here
so it's a really nice design.
By the way, if you don't know about it already,
The Wood Whisperer Guild is essentially
a virtual woodworking school of sorts
so if you want to check that out,
go to WoodWhispererGuild.com,
that's the address, right? I think so.
Okay, so on this side of the shop,
you can see I've got my hand tool storage up here.
Very happy with this cabinet,
which also was a Guild project last year.
Okay, this cabinet's fantastic.
Not real happy with the storage underneath,
but I'm still not sure what to do with it.
My finishing cabinet is nice,
everything is pretty stored, but I'm packed there.
I think I may be able to make use of this upper area
to get some more extra storage space
that's just out of the way.
You've got to really think vertically
when you've got a wood shop like this.
You want to make sure you make use -
I mean, think about all that wasted space
that's up there for things that I don't use very often.
That's wasted opportunity.
Okay, workbench, you guys know
I'm not completely happy with my workbench
and making a new one is certainly on my to-do list,
just not to do any time soon.
Over here, this is interesting.
I love this tool because it's powerful,
it's very handy when you need it.
The problem is this combo disc and belt sander,
I just don't use it that often.
I can count the number of times in the last year
how many times I've used it on one hand.
I mean, literally it's just one of those tools
that you don't realize how much you don't need it
until you've actually got it.
It just seemed like something I would use so often
and oddly enough I just don't.
So that may be something that,
if I can come up with a way of storing
some of my tools temporarily,
maybe getting a storage unit
or putting a shed in the back or something,
I may take this out of the shop and get this space
a little more opened up for other things.
I could use as much floor space as I can get.
Now over here, (laughs), this is unusual.
Normally I don't pile a bunch of crap
on my oscillating spindle sander,
but this, however, is a tool that I use a lot.
You guys know I put a lot of curves in my work
and when you make curves, a spindle sander
is an absolute treat to have in the shop.
So this is something that is going nowhere.
But something as simple as this was like okay,
here's a little alcove, what am I doing with it?
I've got all my little sandpaper things from my drum sander.
I've got Donatello over here
watching over the workshop.
He'll mess you up if you come in here
when you're not supposed to be in here.
And just a couple other odds and end.
Well, it was a wasted space.
Put a shelf there, you know.
Stuff like that is very handy.
So I think the bottom line is when I moved here,
a lot of you already know this story,
I really expected to be able to build
my new shop relatively soon.
The problem is reality struck and we still have,
after a year of being into this, we still have
a second mortgage to deal with so there's no
way we're going to be able to build a shop
until that's taken care of.
So I have to make this as user friendly
and efficient as possible
so I don't know how long I'm going to be here,
but I have to make the most of it.
So now all the things that I kind of rushed into place,
I don't know if you remember the video,
but I did a video when I first moved into this space.
It was horrendous.
Everything was just piled up on one side of the shop,
it was crazy.
Then I came to terms with the fact that
I was going to be here for awhile,
I did a reorganization, I put in the dust collection,
and it feels good, it feels like
a relatively efficient work space.
Now I'm at what I would call like round three.
Now I'm looking and really trying to refine this space
to make it that much more efficient.
So this goes back to what I've said numerous times
about the evolution of a workshop.
You would think by now I would
know where things should go,
I would have it in my head what the
best organization from one machine to the next
or what the best storage idea is.
and I just don't.
I'm always flying by the seat of my pants
and trying to come up with the best idea
given the situation that I'm confronting here.
So anyway, I thought it would be cool
to give you a little tour
and, you know, another thing I do want to mention
is we just moved the forum and put it in -
Well, we have a new software
basically what it comes down to.
Awesome, awesome forum software.
You gotta go there.
We already have a ton of posts.
I can't even keep up with the
number of posts per day.
I used to read all the new ones
and it's just not possible anymore so go check that out.
It's at WoodTalkOnline.com.
You'll probably recognize that name 'cause
that's our audio podcast, Wood Talk Online.
And it's sort of associating the audio podcast
with the forum and the forum with the audio podcast.
Bottom line is we're talking about woodworking
so a lot of good stuff happening there.
And I guess, you know, we'll be back
to a regular project filming schedule
after this Guild build is done so you can expect
those videos to start flowing out pretty soon.
As you can see, I'm nearing completion of this project.
So this is a good one, I'm really happy with this one.
I probably should have talked about this
a little bit more, but oh well, that's for another day.
So thanks for watching,
thanks for coming to the website,
we really appreciate it,
and hopefully we'll see you in the forum.