Randy's Shopping

Randy has been shopping a lot lately. It is probably not what you think, though. For Randy, shopping is working in his workshop which is located in the one of the garage bays. Here is a photo of what the shop area looked like on move-in day. He organized it more as time went on and projects were made, but it was time for an even better set up.

Randy likes grouping items by use. He has his tools in boxes rather than hanging on the wall. Recently he made a number of additional boxes for these smaller tools. The boxes helped organize the shelves even more. The boxes were smaller and would fit into the existing larger boxes if necessary. Suddenly more shelf space was available. 

He recognized that with all of his scroll saw work he needed a table that could hold items that were waiting to be cut, were already cut, a place for blades, and maybe storage room for small materials. This was built and became a great place to put all of the small pieces of lumber, tile, and other items that were formerly scattered throughout the small shop. This caused more shelf areas to open up.

Over Christmas break, he was contemplating the equipment that he has and observed that if he could move the planer over next to the table saw that it would really open up the shop. He moved the books that were there up two shelves, cut the shelf shorter, and bang! The planer was next to the table saw.

He decided that the large sawdust collector would fit into the corner if the shelves were moved just a bit. With this done, again more room was found in the shop with some shelf space lost. However, it had been located behind the dust collector and not reachable.

He next pondered the equipment that was still sitting on the floor, the mortise maker, router table, clamps, and compressor. The mortise maker was the tool that really needed a permanent home. It is used to make square holes in wood to contain the matching square tenon cut into the other half of the joint.

He decided that a bench with storage for the router table was needed until it too could have a permanent home. Over the holidays, he built the bench frame out of 2x4 studs. They were appropriately all put together with mortise and tenon joints. This took a while longer but the bench ended up being strong and the wheels made it easily portable.  

The clamps were again falling all over the shop. They ranged in size from small 2 inch pressure clamps to rail clamps ranging from 6 inch to 6 foot in length. In Grants Pass, he had all of them mounted on a wall. Here we do not have the same option. He decided to build a roll around clamp stand to contain the 30 or so clamps. Due to space constraints, the 4 foot and 6 foot clamps would still need to go elsewhere. They are used less often and would be moved to the upper shelf.

After studying clamp racks from various sources, he decided on a rack that would fit underneath the shelves (40 inches high) and it would be about 3 feet long. It would use swivel casters that did not lock as it was not going to be used as a work bench. The clamps soon had a new home. Now that they are not on top of one another, they are ordered by size, and can be rolled close to the work bench when they are needed.

Additional items will also find their home on this useful stand. The compressor will be moved to the corner by the dust collector.

Here is a photo of the shop after the above improvements.

So what is the next project? It will be the router table with storage for the router, bits, and fence for this very useful device. It has to be made lower than the mortise table because size of its size. It will be built with mortise and tenon joints again for strength. What happens after that – more “shopping” of course.