Craig from Springfield, Ohio - Shop of the Week

July 23, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Shop of the Week 

Here are some pics of my very small one car garage wood shop! Here I am pictured with my current project, a small bookcase. This is about the largest piece I can handle as you will see in the rest of the pictures I have very limited space!

The door in the next set of pics leads to a small room that contains a furnace for a 600 sq foot addition we added to the back of our home. While building, I took advantage of the situation and used the furnace to heat and cool the shop. I also use this small room for tool storage and sharpening. The green tool chest holds all my hand planes, marking tools, chisels, dovetail saws, etc. In the next pic you see my jointer, table saw, and work bench are all crammed together on a wall. Believe it or not it actually works quite well! Large pieces of stock or sheet goods are impossible to machine here but that’s where the Festool comes in! If you look closely, under the work bench you can see my router table. (I just pull it out and set it on the bench to use it.)

The last pic just shows how I share the storage area with the furnace for our addition. When we did the addition I also increased the electrical capacity. My shop went from a few outlets with about 20A total to more than 20 outlets and 100 Amps! The wall to the right is a pegboard wall that I use to store all my templates and some tools.

I absolutely love my Festool, I use it almost exclusively to build my projects. I’m a huge fan of the entire system. I have 2 MFT’s the large one you can see in the next set of pics, the smaller one is folded up and is sitting next to the MFT1080. If I could do over again my entire shop would be Festool from the beginning! With my limited space, the Festool system is a great fit. The next shot shows the inside of the storage/furnace room. I have a sharpening area set up in there all well as my shop stereo, (with sat radio) and a TV with a DVD for watching instructional videos. I also use this area for tool storage. All four walls are pegboard from floor to ceiling. Thickness planer, miter saw, band saw, dust collection, and wood storage are all very close together as shown in the last picture. The cool thing is that the dust collector can handle all these stationary machines from where it sits without ductwork!

Well that’s my small, but efficient shop! I absolutely love to work in here because everything is just a few steps away. It’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and thanks to Festool it’s almost completely dust free! It’s a very enjoyable place to spend whatever free time I can manage. I hope you enjoyed my little shop tour as much I enjoyed sharing it with you!

Comments

7 Responses to “Craig from Springfield, Ohio - Shop of the Week”

  1. Vic on July 23rd, 2008 1:02 pm

    Craig,

    I noticed your furnace is a high efficiency gas unit. Be sure to use CO detectors in your shop and through out the house, particularly the bedrooms. Better safe.
    Really efficient use of space. Great job on the set-up.

  2. kentuckybill on July 24th, 2008 7:56 am

    Nice use of a small space Craig. I have a small shop too, so I know about maximizing your space. Very nice bookcase project there too.

  3. Richard on July 24th, 2008 10:29 am

    Now that is a great looking shop!

  4. Sharon on July 24th, 2008 10:51 am

    looks awesome - neat and organized - I like that. everything has it’s place, and it leaves you with adequate room to move about and do some work.

    nice use of the space!

  5. BoredCutter on July 24th, 2008 3:26 pm

    Hey Craig,

    Good grief, how incredibly efficient!

    (Geez, and I’m complaining about the cramped space of a 2-car garage!)

    Your shop is an inspiration to me to work even more efficiently with the space I’ve got. We’ve got some similar tastes in tool choices, too! Very nice!

    If any one did, you had the perfect excuse (no room) on which to blame shoddy craftsmanship, but seeing that project, you couldn’t.

    That bookcase looks ….. AWESOME! Well done!

    And my gawd! Your shop’s storage shelves look so ordered…. you must be some kind of neat freak! :)

    Keep up the great work, you may well have the makings of another Marc Spagnuolo!

    Thanks For the Tour!

    BoredCutter

  6. Craig on July 25th, 2008 12:41 pm

    Vic, thanks for the heads up, but believe me I get more cold or hot fresh air than I want leaking through the 1/4 gaps around the edges of the garage door! :-) Any ideas how to seal this area while still making the door operational?? Weather Strip would not work because the gap is front to back not the sides…does that make sense? In other words when the door rides on its tracks it leaves a variable gap the entire length between the frame and the face of the door. I wanted to just replace the garage door with a set of 36″ double doors but my better half laid down a veto!

  7. Craig on July 25th, 2008 12:54 pm

    Such nice comments from all of you, especially BoredCutter! I shared your comments with my wife and she laughed out loud about the “neat freak” comment because the truth is I am probably one of the worst slobs you would ever meet!

    I keep my shop organized because I have to in order to work effectively and store everything; but believe me thats the only reason!! My car is unfit for rats! My home would not be much better if not for my extremely clean wife!!

    Such enjoyable comments from everyone though! Thank you! Other viewers of the site please post your shops! I really enjoy seeing the space fellow lovers of woodworking work their craft!

Got something to say?





  • What's New???

  • Google


  • Check this out!!

    Loading the LumberJocks Widget

  • Extra Reading