Shop setup and tools.

[Hank]

<font color="purple"> I'm curious what y'all would list in priority order as THE list of power tools to have in a woodworking workshop </font color>

Of course, it depends on what you want to do [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

I definitely like the suggestion about the benches being the same height. Many was the time I needed to stretch out my work, and this helped.

A good bench does not have to be elaborate. 4x4 legs with a 2x6 rails and 2x6 t&amp;g top works very well, esp. when topped with a piece of .25" masonite, which can easily be replaced to reface the top. You can mount a vise anywhere on that, and use a variety of clamps to secure work to it.

As for stationary power tools, again it depends on what you want to do, and what you want to spend. I worked for 22 years in a custom mill that was elaborately equipped. We made virtually anything out of any kind of wood.

Bread and butter was custom sash and door, for which we had dedicated mortisers, tenoners and shapers. Also we fabricated custom cabinetwork and custom moldings, plus anything else you might imagine, including lots of radius work.

But, day-to-day, I found myself situated, in order, at (1st) my bench, (2nd) a Delta table saw, (3rd) a Powermatic jointer, (4th) a good bandsaw, (5th) a good planer, and (6th), the Powermatic shaper.

The easiest tool to underestimate is the jointer. If you get a good 6" machine, with a good depth of cut, you can woodwork wonders. You can do so much with a jointer, angle cuts, rabetting, tapering, outside radiusing, trimming cabinet doors to fit, and so on, including preparing glue joints or making straight edges [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

A lathe is nice, esp if you need to do furniture parts. We had an old one that came from an overhead shaft shop; it would turn 14 feet between centers and 30" on face, but there was not much call for lathe work. Again, depends on what you want to do.

[Pat]

Pete, Good point about how workspaces get rearranged and that could obsolete hardwiring the controls for the dust collector. (vacuum pipes too) I guess I'll have to consider a remote and overhead distribution of the vacuum tubes. Tee fittings are easy to add and the freed up hole can be capped if a location is made obsolete or temporarily not occupied.

Pat

[Pat]

Egon, the only serious kickback I ever had was on the radial arm saw with the molding blade thing. It threw a 2x4 back at me. The board bounced off of me and then hit a window in the sun/Jacuzzi room and glanced off it and likewise a second window. Very lucky, no broken glass by some miracle. Seems there was this knot...

Pat

[AndyF]

&gt;&gt; This new shop will be attached to the house like an attached garage and the garage will be at the other end of it away from the house.

From your comments it sounds like you will be able to keep machine sounds out of the house. Another thing to consider is smell. Most wood finishes and solvents are pretty stinky and the smell goes everywhere. Give some thought as to how you will manage the odors from finishing materials. With a stand alone shop its easy to shut the door and go back to the house and not smell anything. With your attached shop, you may have to look at a spray booth vented away from the house.

[Pat]

Andy, I'll give some thought to ventilation/odor control. OK, 10 seconds was plenty... you are right, it needs to be considered in the design. I think I have an idea of what to do. I need to have air flow across the shop and place the dirtiest operations the farthest "downstream." Then I can elect to throw the used air away or recycle it depending on whether or not it contains stuff that I don't have filters to handle. For instance, chemical fumes would be something that I think would be uneconomical to filter out of the shop air so I can wear a respirator or throw the contaminated air away.

If I choose two opposing walls and make one an inlet and the other an outlet I can circulate air across the room. Filter panels would remove particulates and the air exit on the opposite wall could either allow air to be vented to the outside or recirculated, again, depending on what was happening, dust or fumes.

Sounds complicated perhaps but isn't. I could use pegboard for the inlet and outlet diffusers and since most holes in a pegboard storage wall are not filled, the walls that are diffusers are still pegboard storage, especially at the discharge side where hanging tools make little difference. I'll have to do some thinking/calculating to determine the distance out from the structural wall that the pegboard diffuser wall has to be mounted to give enough cross section to allow the holes in the pegboard to equalize flow. Might have to place some internal baffles to aid equalization but they would do double duty and brace the pegboard as well.

The idea would be to have filtered air gently blowing across the room horizontally. A clean room philosophy says that you place progressively dirtier operations nearer and nearer the exit wall. In this instance, likewise the smelly operations. In general, there would not be much mixing lateral to the direction of air flow and not much contamination from downstream activities making it upstream if you are careful about eddies.

I know this sounds like a lot of bother but it isn't. It should be pretty innexpensive compared to buying a few dust filter air cleaning units like the small Delta brand units. You could make it more expensive by buying large HEPA filters and removing particulate contamination down to class 100 cleanroom specs (no more than 100 particles per liter of air larger than 0.1 microns, if memory serves.)

A manual flapper valve could switch from recirc to fresh air. If you wanted to minimize the loss of conditioned air in summer or winter you could separate the exit wall into multiple sections and only discard the air downstream of a fume source while recirculating the rest. This is practical since there isn't much migration sideways to the flow. Valving is simple DIY flapper or blast gate style controls.

Without real fancy filters, I don't see how this would cost much more than just puting up copious quantities of pegboard on two walls. A few scraps of wood and some time to build it. You need to build a fairly large filter rack to hold filters (like washable filter media or whatever) so maybe you would use lattice below and or behind the work tables at the exhaust end of the room to back up the filters which could be stacked on top of each other and held in place with "L" screws, butterfly fasteners or whatever. A larger filter surface will have less resistance to flow (smaller fan requirement) and hold more junk before you have to clean the filters.

Pat

[monnie31]

We have a workshop. My husband built a work bench and he is about to build a saw horse. We have a 10 inch Craftsman band saw, 10 inch Ryobi Planer, Mastercraft Table saw that needs replacing, 20 inch Craftsman Scroll Saw, King Drill Press, King 10 in sliding compact MITRE saw. We also need to look into some type of heating for it.