| Blog series by shipwright | updated 500 days ago | 3 parts | 9039 reads | 57 comments total |
Part 1: The Space and the Tool List
When we bought a winter home in Green Valley AZ. in 2007 it didn’t take me long to realize that I couldn’t spend half of the year without a shop. The problems were that there wasn’t any space for one except the semi-enclosed carport and it’s hard to justify the price of “two of everything” good quality tools. This blog is about the solution I arrived at. For starters here’s the space I had to work with. The bench is 26” x 8’ and ...
Part 2: The Beating Heart of the Shop
There are two institutions to be given credit for how well I have been able to equip my shop for so little money and in so little space. They cannot be separated. They are ShopSmith and Craigslist. I was for most of my life one of the “pros” who have all the tools and looked down my nose at multi-function tools in general and ShopSmith in particular. I was wrong. If you can justify the money and have the space, fine, you don’t need to consider them and can go on in bli...
Part 3: What Can You Turn Out in a Shop on the Cheap?
All of the stationary stuff that I described in the last post cost around $1500 or less with a little shrewd horse trading and not really a lot of looking on CL. I said that my investment might be as high as $2500. The rest is all standard stuff like drills, sanders routers, grinder etc. and far too boring to go into. The main gist here is that you can do it with quality tools and still not spend a fortune. Maybe more importantly, it needn’t take up a lot of space. The ShopSmith come...
