Odds & ends

Even a little garage shop like mine is made up of scores of miscellaneous tools, accessories, shelves, and other storage things. Here are a few of the things that round out my shop.

Light. I've tried a variety of different lighting over the years. The shop space had ordinary T12 fluorescent shop lights when we moved in (T12 = 12/8″ = 1½″). I replaced the bulbs with full spectrum bulbs, which helped some. I also added a couple supplemental halogen shop lights at one point, but they burned way too hot for comfort (and they pull a lot of juice).

I recently replaced all the old shop lights in my shop with T5 fluorescent lights, changed the placement so that they are directly over each work area, and added a few more fixtures to ensure good light in all areas. I'm really happy with the much nicer light cast by the T5 bulbs (T5 = 5/8″). My shop is now much brighter and feels more welcoming.

There's some great T5 information at the Lighting Research Center: T5 Fluorescent Systems.

Heat. My shop is in a converted garage. In the summer, it stays nice and cool, and I love to throw open the overhead door as I work to let in the fresh air and for the views of the foothills and pine trees. In winter, it's only marginally heated, and has a cement floor, which really can hold the cold. I tried an oil-filled radiator and a coil heater with a fan; neither did the trick. The Marvin Overhead Quartz Radiant heater does. When it's cool, I turn on one element. When it's cold, I turn on both elements. When it's bitter, I turn on a second one at the other end of the shop.

A radiant heater emits infra-red heat waves that heat objects rather than the air. That means people, tools, and the floor heat up. It's a wonderful heat source.

Important caveat! This heater draws a lot of current (at the high setting, it pulls 1375 watts), so make sure the circuits you plug them into are adequate for the task.

Vices. I really like the Record 52½ED bench vice from Sheffield. I use this heavy vice all the time when sanding edges and for many other processes that require another steady hand. It has a very smooth screw action and the fast action makes it a breeze to close with just an additional quick turn or two to tighten. When the piece I'm holding is longer, I simply clamp the other end to the bench using a deep throated, heavy duty bar clamp.

I mounted the vice on the end of the long side of my table, with the back plate behind the table's maple edge. I also added a thick matching maple jaw liner to the the front plate, so I'm clamping between wood surfaces.

I also have a smaller portable version of this vice that I use sometimes when working on lamps.

Unfortunately, Record discontinued making vices, but Tools for Working Wood carries an "excellent" copy by Anant.

Drills and dogs. I usually don't get very excited about drills. I have several corded and cordless drills. They do the job, and that's about as much as I can say about them.

Recently, when I upgraded my workbench table top, I needed to drill a series of ¾″ holes into the bench top to hold bench dogs. Having just sweated over adding the new maple top to my bench, I didn't feel like risking boring holes in it with a cheap spade bit, so I purchased a good quality ¾″ HSS brad point. The only problem was that all of my drills are 3/8″ and this bit has a ½″ shank. Well, okay, that's not really a problem … it's an opportunity to get a new tool!

I looked at what was available in ½″ and decided that this was a good opportunity to take a leap and get one of the new Lithium-Ion cordless drills. After doing my usual research I chose the Makita BHP454 18V LXT ½″ Hammer Driver-Drill (every review I read rated it the best of the Li-Ion drills). You can see it below standing on the new table top between a Bench Dog (clamped to the side of the table in a simple maple jig) and a Wonder Dog at the other side of the table.

This is a surprisingly compact and lightweight drill compared to the others I have, but it drilled a ¾″ hole through the 3¾″ table top, which is made up of layers of maple, plywood, and furniture grade particle board, with absolute ease and no runout or wobble. After I had successfully drilled the first hole, I can honestly say that I was, for the first time in my life, thrilled with a drill's performance.

UPDATE: A few months after first writing about this drill and bit, I drilled another 20 holes in the table, spaced every 6″ along both sides. I am so impressed with this combination! The drilling was totally smooth, and the lines of dog holes came out beautifully.

I paired the drill with a Bosch Clic-Change chuck, my favorite quick-change system. Sweet!

Doweling jig. I sometimes use glue dowels for my joints, especially when I'm joining edges. For years I've used a simple doweling jig that was okay, but not quite precise. The last time I used it was to join some maple boards, and I was disappointed enough with the lack of precision that I decided to look around and see if there was anything better available. I found the Dowelmax Precision Joinery System created by longtime Canadian woodworker and retired engineer Jim Lindsay.

At first, the price of the system took my breath away. But as I studied it further I realized that this is a beautifully designed, quite versatile, cleverly engineered tool. So I caught my breath and ordered it. When I opened the box and held the jig, I suspected I had made the correct decision. The jig and its components are impeccably manufactured.

As soon as I had an opportunity to use it, again to do edge joinery on some maple boards, I knew I had made the correct decision. It's very easy to align dowel holes along the entire length of the boards, and the pieces aligned beautifully when I glued them up. I look forward to using the jig in all of its many other configurations over the coming years.

Planer. The Makita 2012NB 12″ is the only planer I've used, so I can't make a comparison to other brands. All I can say is that it's easy to use, produces clean cuts, and features easily replaceable HSS blades. I'm not a big fan of spending a lot of my time sharpening blades, so that's a plus for me (the blades are two-sided so one set lasts quite a long time).

It does produce a bit of snipe at the leading and tail ends of the board (it takes a tiny bit deeper cut off the leading 2″ or so, as well as about 1″ off the tail. That doesn't bother me, but if you're concerned about that, there are a couple newer portable planers that claim to have further reduced snipe using a "head lock" feature. For more information about snipe, see page 5 of the Technical Information sheet for the 2012NB (PDF).

Jointer. I picked up a Ridgid JP0610 jointer during the summer of 2011. With a 4-foot long bed, it's one of the smallest floor-standing jointers around, but that makes it compact enough to fit into my little shop and light enough for me to handle on my own, and it's really all I need for the kind of projects I do.

I spent a Saturday assembling it, including mounting it on a Rockler All-Terrain mobile base (recommend!), and converting it to 220v. Cranked it up for a few test passes … and discovered the infeed and outfeed tables weren't coplanar. Got kind of bummed and set it aside, not wanting to deal with the chore of returning it.

For the next several weekends I looked for other things to do in my shop, but finally decided to tackle the jointer again one weekend. I took the tables apart, but couldn't find anything obviously wrong, so I reassembled them and decided to try adding shims to one of the tables. I had picked up a set of feeler gauges to use for this, and started out with a 0.010" shim. That was too much, so I slowly worked my way down to 0.002" and found that was still too much! What the heck? Then I tried it without a shim and found the tables to be spot on. Something must've knocked them out of alignment during transport, and simply disassembling and reassembling them eliminated the issue. I felt a little foolish for not having checked the alignment immediately after reassembling, but happy none the less.

I fired it up, did some test passes, and got wonderful results. What a relief! This gives me much more control over preparing stock. Best of all, I can visit some of our local sawmills and start picking up some rough-sawn wood for my projects, which gives me much more flexibility. There is one place in particular, TC Woods, that processes salvaged local woods, which is something I really like.

This is the last big tool I wanted in my shop, so it's a good feeling to have it set up and ready to go. I've already used it to prepare the edges of the top pieces of a small bedside stand for gluing up, and it worked like a charm.

Storage. You can never have enough clamps and you can never have enough shelves and drawers to store things! I built a lot of wooden shelves for my workshop, but I didn't know how to solve the drawer challenge cost (or time) effectively until I came across these steel drawers. Until then, I had tons of lidded cardboard boxes, which work, but break down after a couple years of use. These drawers provided a wonderful solution, and I now have 40 of them in different sizes (1″, 2″, and 3″ deep) around my shop, most mounted on the rolling stands for my bigger power tools.

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I use them to store the assortment of little things that make a shop a home, especially all the odds 'n ends that accrue over a couple decades of doing projects, and that make it possible to do or repair almost anything without having to run to a hardware store. I marked many of the drawers with a drawing of what they contain. I find it easier to find the right drawer with an image rather than words.

The drawers are simple to install: you just use a circular or table saw to create grooves in a couple pieces of wood, and the drawers slide in those grooves. Nothing fancy, but they sure do the trick.

The Zometool. What's this doing in a list of woodworking tools? Well, I use this fun physical 3-D modeling tool to make models of my lamps. www.Zometool.com

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