Tony’s Basement Shop in Ohio

I have a 20′ x 24′ basement shop with 9′ ceilings. When I built my house a couple years ago, I planned for this space being a shop so I ran 2 power circuits under the floor to the table saw location. My house has a 6-zone forced air heating system and the shop is on its own zone. Its a nice feature and very efficient.

I have a 1HP Jet dust collector with an add-on second stage. I do have blast gates. I have a wye with two gates at the horizontal run at the ceiling for the TS and RAS, and one on the run to the lathe and one that runs to the floor sweep/ vac port. The suction is great as long as one gate is open at a time. That first stage collector drum is great. It actually has a cyclone effect inside. I also have that Jet air filtration hanging from the ceiling. With both running, I probably get about 95% of the dust. Also, its clean because I am really anal about keeping it that way. Believe me, It has looked pretty rough in there but it only lasts a couple days max before I have to clean it. I have access to it from the rest of the basement and also through a Bilco door that leads to the end of our driveway. Its great, I just back my truck right up to the door to unload materials.

I made the 8′ door into the shop so I could get 4×8 sheets down the stairs with ease. The shop is still growing. The views you see are from each of the four corners of the shop. All the cabinets in the shop either came from the Merilatt factory outlet ($5 for a 30″ base cabinet!) or the local University auction ($1 for a 6′ base cabinet!). The brown cabinets under the RAS are from the auction. They came out of a chemistry lab. I have a usual compliment of tools. That’s my restored Craftsman RAS. The RBI scroll saw I got for free from someone who didn’t know what it was worth (I wasn’t even aware about it at the time).

I’m most proud of my autographed picture of Norm, see if you can find it. The floor is coated with a water-based epoxy and the walls are poured concrete with a light coat of primer to lighten it up. I also ran the power for the entire shop through a few switches mounted up high on the wall. That way I can shut off the power to everything and my two young children cant reach them to turn them on. Also check out my Wood Whisperer style assembly table. It is 4′ x 8′ and is at the same height as my table saw and acts as an infeed table.