Brian Havens's Workshop

OK, 175 days later, I finally have some respectable photos of the shop. To say that I have a shop in a two-car garage would not be accurate. What I do have is a shop crammed into a two-car garage. I often wonder how I managed to get so much stuff in there and still have room to work. When I first started working wood, while surfing the internet for shop ideas, I happened upon one woodworker’s post that said something like: “Finally, after three years, I have my shop set up”. “Three years!” I thought “This guy is nuts. It cannot be that hard to setup a shop. Just get a bunch of tools and throw them into the garage, and voilà, you have a shop.” ... Here I am, six years later, and I am still re-arranging, re-organizing, and tweaking. :-)) Like most of us, I have to be ruthlessly judicious about what gets to take up space in my shop. In addition to the usual advice culled from magazines, one principle that has works for me is to have any horizontal work surface pull at least double, if not triple, duty.

picture #1 – General purpose work bench and cabinets.
I use this for sharpening most of the time, since I turn regularly, and since I use a lot of hand tools, but it is also strategically located near my table saw/router table (just left of the work bench) and near my miter saw (even with the rightmost cabinet). When I have a large project with a lot of parts, especially one with a lot of panels, I put away the sharpening equipment away, and use this area to organize the parts as I run cuts through the table saw. When cutting long pieces on the miter saw, I can use the work surface to support the piece. Lastly, I use the left side of the cabinet, which is just next to the router table, to store and setup hand held routers.

picture #2 – Table saw and router table
If you were standing, in front of the aforementioned work bench, and did a military style “left face”, then this is what you would see. Having a router table combined with the table saw is, perhaps, the biggest space saver. The router table top is a 3” thick torsion box, laminated with high-pressure laminate. It is not visible in this photo, but there is about 12” of permanent out feed table, and another 32” that folds down.

picture #3 – Torsion Box Assembly Table.
As this takes up a good amount of space, I debated long and hard about adding this, but I can say now that I have no regrets. I made this about a year ago, and it is still dead flat. In addition to assembly, I also use this to lay out parts when I am rough cutting lumber (it is just to the right of the miter saw.), to do finishing

picture #4 – Workbench
A workbench, by its nature, is multi functional, but I have also placed it just to the left of the table saw and at the same level as the table saw. This allows me to use the workbench as support when cutting exceptionally long pieces on the table saw. It is also near the “milling wall”, so I use it to organize pieces when jointing and planing.

picture #5 – The “milling wall”
Here I have lined up all the various machines that have a strait line feed: the jointer, the planer, the drum sander. The planer and the drum sander are on mobile bases, so that I can make room for milling longer pieces. I also chose this wall since there is clearance to feed long stock strait out the garage. It is also a strait shot from the door to the house, into the laundry room and into the kitchen. I do not think long stock will be a problem. :-))

picture #6 – Turning and drilling
This will not look like this for long—that is good news. The Powermatic 3520B is on the way!

-- If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, who will cut it up into bowl blanks?