(elated music) nicole: marc! can you come in here and help me clean? (determined music) hey, i could really use your help.
essential power tools woodworking shop, marc: i wish i could honey but i am right in amiddle of a huge project. (background laughing) i guess i should probably start
talking about wood working now. welcome to episode two of thewood whisperer video podcast. i am the king and this is my castle. most might call it a garagebut you and i know better. this is a refuge, it's a second home and most importantlyit's a breathing ground for our creativity. unfortunately for many it's a place where our wivesinsist on parking their cars.
i don't understand that. you women, will we everunderstand your ways. now, if you're a woodworker who insists on parking in the garage, i really have nothing to say to you. now, i don't know about you guys but i love getting an inside look at other woodworker shops. there always seems to be some storage idea
or a jig or something that i want to copy. i can't count the numberof times i've hit pause during a woodworking show just to see what was in the background. before we jump in to any projects, i'm going to give you guysthe grand tour of my shop. come on. i don't know if any ofyou can see it over here but there is a little saladdressing stain on my shirt.
last night at dinner my wife forgot to screw the cap back on but just placed the cap back on the bottle and marc shook it, tryingto get a little dressing on his salad and wound up getting dressing all over the placeincluding my cool shirt. anyway, that's not my fault but at the center of the shop, the most important tool and my opinion
is the table saw. you have to have a good amount of space around the table saw if you're maneuvering eightfoot sheets of plywood, you want to have that extra room. just a couple of the featuresi want to show you here. first of all i use zero clearance insert around the blade that'sgoing to avoid tear out and give you a lot more of a cleaner cut.
this is just a standard thing that i keep on the table saw at all times. i also have a independent splitter, an after-market splitter. that's very easy to remove actually and one thing that i found is if you can remove these things and get them out of theway when you need to and it's just as easy to put them back.
you're going to use them. the problem is most safety things aren't really designed tobe easy to get on and off, in and out and most people just don't use them and they throw them to the side. anything that you can doto avoid that is good. i also have an incra miter gauge here. awesome tool, i use that every single time
i'm in the shop. a couple other things downbelow, dust collection. i've got a six inch port at the bottom. i had to modify this table saw and actually had to cutit which hurt me to do it but you got to do what you got to do. in fact i think i went alittle bit too big on that and i've actually sacrifice the quality of the dust collection
but it still gets most of this stuff so i'm pretty satisfied with the result. the last thing is my blade guard or more accurately it's just a dustcollection hood or shroud. this guy has a little twoand a half inch port here and does collect areasonable amount of dust that's raised above the blade so that's pretty cool.
i also have a homemade outfeed table. everything is just prettymuch bought from home depot except for the legs here. these i actually gotfrom a scrap metal yard. these are essentially justhinged and you can drop it. i don't want to, it'skind of a pain in the butt but essentially if you're usingeight foot sheets of plywood this thing's going to reallysave you a lot of trouble. it's going to make the cuts a lot safer
as you push everythingthrough the table saw. once it's through the blade you don't have to have a spotter, someone else helping youat the end of the cut. this is going to sit righton top of the outfeed table it's going to be nice and safe. the last thing i want toshow you at the table saw is this little kick switch. it's a really good safety precaution here.
essentially you have tobe able to put your finger through the hole andactually with some effort turn the saw on and veryeasy to turn the saw off. you just kick it, turns it off. the idea is to make it verydifficult to turn it on but really easy to turn it off and i just find that to be a really good safety addition to any table saw. now across from my table sawi have three other tools.
i've got a powermatic planer. it's a tool that basicallywill yield a flat and parallel surface and just shaves off material from the top of a piece of wood. i've got my scroll saw. i use that for lots ofintricate little curve cuts. also use it for marquetryand cutting my inlay pieces and over here is a greatluxury to have in the shop if you can afford it.
it's a drum sander, performax drum sander. essentially in theoryit does the same thing as a planer but you got to bea lot more careful with it. it's a lot more gentleand that it uses sandpaper instead of blades to give youthat flat parallel surface. really it's for finishing. it's not so much for millingmaterial down to size. against the door over herei've got a drill press. i've got a nice selectionof bits and my miter saw.
another essential tool that i have is my sirius satellite radio, my ipod where i listen to all my podcasts and a little bit of huey lewis. on this side of the shop right behind me, you could see is supposedto be my scrap storage area and some of my exotic wood storage and also a turning area but unfortunately it'sbeen temporarily turned
into a garage sale, extra crap area. over here i've got a crosscutting sort of panel, horizontal panel saw ifyou will, made by festool. again, that's a reallynice luxury to have. i don't have a full scale panel saw so this really helps mecut down large pieces of plywood in a short amount of time. if you ever wanted to knowhow to drill a square hole, this machine is the way to do it.
it's a hollow chisel mortiser. if you do a lot of workwhere you're going to have to do a lot of mortises, this tool's really indispensable. it can save you a lot of time. you can make the mortise with a router. you could do it by hand but this guy really is going to saveyou a bunch of time. it works like a drill presswith a vertical action.
i've got a little chargingstation next to that and this is my oscillating spindle sander. again, it's just one ofthose specialized tools really the one trick pony sort of tool but when you need a tool like this, there's just not awhole lot else out there that will do that job. living in a desert in arizona, one major challenge is tryingto stop the wood movement
especially in sheet goods. you'd be surprised. most of these sheet goods come in. they look like they're nice and flat but they've been shippedin from some place to i don't know, northerncalifornia, the east coast. places where there's a lot more moisture than there is here. by the time i get them in my shop
and i lay them flat and iget them ready for a project, they dry out a little bit more and the thing turns into a potato chip. i had to come up with a way to store them and keep them flat and also just make it reallyconvenient for myself. i've got this rack here, avertical rack that i built and i have these veneer press screws. i've got three of them over the length
of each piece of plywood and i just tighten them up, it pushes them againstthe supports on the side and it's a good way for meto store them nice and flat as the moisture leavesthe piece of plywood. by the time i'm ready to useit, it's still nice and flat and it's just a really good convenience especially for someone wholives in a climate like i do. over here we've just gotsome safety item storage,
whatever storage, very cool. tape storage, junk storage, we don't go out there very often. i don't recommend it. i've got most of my heavyduty lumber storage up here. with a shop this tall,it's a really good idea to make use of some ofthat vertical space. if you can, it can be a little dangerous getting the stuff down
but if you keep your wits about you it shouldn't be a problem. under the lumber racks you could see i've got a decent amount of clamps. it's been said beforeand i'll say it again, you can never have too many clamps. it may look like i've got enough but when you're in the middle of gluing up three or four differentthings at the same time
and you run out of clamps, you're going to be pretty upset. definitely buy as many clamps as you can, yeah. over here in the center ofthe back portion of the shop i've got a torsion box assembly table. this basically is something that i learned from watching woodworksand learn from david marks. a torsion box is essentiallya honeycomb structure.
the idea is we want a dead flat surface. we don't want this thing to ever bend, move or anything. if you think of the waya honeycomb is designed, it's designed for strength essentially even though it's a hollow structure. same concept but we'rejust doing right angles in terms of the actual interior structure. made out of mdf and i built it years ago
and it's still dead flat today. on the assembly tableright now you could see i'm in a middle of a littlepoker chip tray project here. i'm writing an article for a magazine and hopefully it willbe published, we'll see but these are pretty cool,little poker chip trays. under the assembly table i'vegot a few handy features. i've got my air compressor, it's just a little guy
and i've got this retractable air hose. a compressed air in a woodworkingshop is indispensable. you definitely have to getsome sort of compressed air. i also have a littlehandy role of round paper. if i'm doing anythingon the assembly table and i need to protect the surface, just pull this over tothe other side, cut it, tape it down and it's ready to go. on the east wall the shop is pretty much
the finish storage preparation area. i've got a nice metal cabinet that has all my flammablesor most of my flammables, lacquers in there. it's not osha approvedbut i'd rather that stuff be in a metal cabinet thaninside a particle board cabinet. as we move over, i'veactually got a nice wide formica top here. when you start mixing finishes and dyes
and pigments and things like that, it gets messy and you want to make sure whatever surface you're workingon is either replaceable, easy to clean or youjust don't care about it because it's going to get messy and you'll never going toget it perfectly clean. i've got some goodorganization, my respirator, my work tunes, headphones,these are awesome. some of my spray stuff is over here
but you definitely needa nice wide surface to get something like that done. next to the finishing areai have a workshop hudge that i actually justbuilt, it's pretty basic. the primary function is sandpaper storage, small part storage. you can check this out real quick. i've got all my sheets of sandpaper pretty well organized by grit.
i've got these littlehandy random orbit sander disk holders for each individual grit that you could take out,take it to the table and start your project. i've got a nice heavy duty vise here in case i need to do any work with metals and i also have a sharpening station. i use a mix of sharpening stones and i also use this tormek unit here.
if you're not familiar with the tormek, it's a pretty pricy unit but it's a really great luxury to have. it keeps my wife happybecause i get to sharpen the kitchen knives with it too but in the future we'redefinitely going to have some sharpening episodes and we'll talk about allthe different options that you have available to you
when it comes to sharpeningfrom the cheapest stuff to the most expensive stuff. now up here i recently reorganized and got these great little handy, i think they're made by stanley. small parts organizers, screw organizers, these are just great. these are a lot more user friendly than those little plastic,
traditional plastic storage units. i always had trouble with them, i break and will lose them. these i could bringright out to the project, use what i need and putthem right back on the shelf and everything i've got is stored basically in these three. on this side of the shop you could see i've got a mobile spray system setup here.
i have a fuji, a three stage turbine. if you're going to go from wipe on stains and wipe on finishes intothe world of spraying, a turbine really is a good way to go. it's completely self contained, you don't need a separate compressor and it really gets youwhere you need to be. you'll be spraying finishes in no time. i highly recommend something like that.
on the north side ofthe shop you could see is my hand tool traditionalwoodworking area. i've got a solid maplewoodworking bench here. it was really fun to build and just to give you a fewwords about workbenches. you can use a set of sawhorses and an old door if you want to and call it a workbench. it really will get the jobdone but something like this,
not only does it lookcool to have in your shop but i consider it's a rite ofpassage into fine woodworking. if you can construct a nicesolid maple top like this, a nice set of legs, reallyis just a great way to go. right over my workbench, you could see i've got a nice tool cabinet full of chisels, some saws,scrapers, block planes and marqueting tools. just to show you a few details here,
these are very cool japanese chisels. i believe it's made bythe fujihiro family. a really cool detail onthe back here to notice is this double hollow. japanese steel is really, really hard so when you go to sharpen it, it takes a long time to grind this flat but if you remove a lot of the material, you essentially can still get a flat back
but you only have to remove material from around the boarder of this hollow. now up here you could see these are pretty standard bench chisels. they're made by marples, cost about 20 bucks for the entire set. these do not have anyhollows ground into the back but it is a little bit of a softer steel. it shouldn't take as long to sharpen
as the japanese chisels will. just to know as far asthe money is concern, these again are great privilege to have. it's a nice treat to have a tool like this but honestly they'reso expensive per chisel for what you get as far as returns, you're really better off justgetting a set of $20 chisels that you can feel confidentto knock around the shop and not be worried that
"oh, i'm going to mess up my chisel." these guys, i do get a lot of use but i reserve my japanesechisels for special tasks things like hands on dovetails and special joinery technique so i really do baby those. just like the chisels, block planes are anotherone of those things where you could spend a ton of money
or you can go to a yard sale, spend about five bucks and come home with three block planes. here's a good example. i have a lie-nielsenregular angle block plane and there's a low angle. actually this is thelow angle block plane. it's just the cadillac of hand planes. it's an awesome tool
but ask anyone who'sactually refurbished the tool and you'll find out that an old stanley. this actually isn't that old but an older tool maybesomething like this guy here. once these things are refurbished, you flatten the sole,maybe even buy a new blade, a nice thick blade to reduce the chatter. get this thing sharpened up and this thing's goingto perform like a champ.
most of the time peoplehave a bad experience with a plane not becauseit's a cheap plane but because it's neverbeen tuned properly. you don't really need tospend this kind of money to necessarily get a good performing tool. you just go to a yardsale or a flea market. along the north side of the shop i've got another critical tool. this is a jointer, six inch.
essentially the jointer's task is not only to mill a wood surface flat but also to square up an edge so it's a perfect 90 degrees. very soon we're goingto get into the details of milling wood, straight,square, flat, parallel and this is a critical toolin that series of tasks. i've got some basicshop storage, saw blade, straight edges, just aboutanything you could imagine.
i just store it up here. over here, i'm fortunate enough to have two different bandsaws. i've got my jet 14 inch andi've got a 16 inch mini max. this is the guy that iuse for resawing lumber. i also use it for cutting my own veneer. it's really heavy duty unit. in between the two i'vegot a router table. if you've got the time to build one,
i highly recommend gettingyourself a nice unit with some storage and make sure you get a nice heavyduty router in the table so you can handle those heavy duty tasks. it's a good idea to alsohave another router. you might want to getone that you can take out of the table and then use it by hand but if you again have the luxury, get one that you can use
that you just leave this guy in a table and then get a plungerouter that you can use for taking the tool to the wood. the last thing i like to show you today is my cyclone dust collector. basically this one, five horsepower unit covers the entire shopand goes to each tool via a six inch main trunk line. the principle behind thiswith the cyclone separation
is as the material spins around it separates the fine material from the dense heavy material. the dense chips andsaw dust and everything settles down right in this big can and i empty it out justabout every couple of days. the lighter, really the mostdangerous stuff for your lungs is actually sent right outside. fortunately i live in a climate
where i can get away withtaking a lot of the interior air and sending it outsidewithout it getting too cold or removing too much air conditioning or in some cases in the winter, removing all the heat from inside. if you look outside here youcould actually see the vent. over here i actually hadto cut into the house to do this but it was worth it. i'm missing one of my little do jobbers
but you get the idea. when this turns on, these guys open up and it throws out all the finedust into my neighbor's yard. now i understand that for most people, a set-up like mine is unrealistic but keep in mind thati do this for a living and these are the toolsthat help me produce the highest quality in theshortest amount of time but a set-up like thisreally isn't necessary
for recreational woodworking. lots of these larger toolsare portables cousins. for instance the circularsaw is essentially just a portable table saw, a jigsaw can cut curvesjust like a bandsaw and if you become skilled in their use, hand planes and benchplanes can do the job of a planer and a jointer. now, if you don't mind hand sanding,
you don't even need a power sander. there are two generalizedset-ups that i recommend for fine woodworking. what i call the bigshop and the small shop. let's take a look. let's talk about the small shop first. maybe you've got a one car garage or even part of a one car garage. some people have a backroom in their house
that they use. either way you should still be able to get a significantamount of woodworking done and you can make some pretty quality stuff with just a few basic tools. now on the table here, i'vegot a few good examples. this is by no means anexhaustive list of tools but it will really get you started and you'll get a lot of things done.
first of all i've got a jigsaw. this little guy actuallyis pretty versatile. you could put numerousdifferent types of blades on it and you can cut a lot ofdifferent materials with it. anything from plywood to solid wood, you can cut straight lines, curves, just about anything. over here we've got a circular saw. this guy again, anotherextremely versatile tool
but probably best suitedfor straight lines. if you try to cut curves,you might lose a limb but this guy with a straightedge is a really effective replacement for a table saw. the next tool i would definitelyrecommend is a router. if you're only going to buy one router, i definitely would recommend you go with a plunged based unit. this way it's just ifyou're making mortises,
it just makes everything a lot easier and if you've ever usedthe plunge base router, you know what i mean. the other option wouldbe a fixed base router but again i feel that they'rea little bit less versatile. i would say they're bettersuited for a table use but these guys are realhandy for putting nice edges on finish pieces. over here we've got a drill.
i mean really this is justan essential household tool as far as i'm concerned. most people probably already have them and you don't need a real fancy one. for most woodworkers, anice 12 volt drill cordless is going to really do thejob, just fine for screws and drilling purposes. in the front here i've gotsome more traditional tools. you don't necessarily have to go out
and spend a bunch of money on a jointer and a planer. if you learn and master these two tools, you can do a lot of those tasks by hand. this is a bench plane andthis guy is a block plane. they even say if thesethings are sharp enough, if you're using it to flatten a board and you want to get a nice flat surface. if you get this sharp enough
and you get this tuned up just right, you don't even need to sandthe project when you're done because you've severedthe fiber so perfectly that it's actually smoother than you could ever get with sandpaper. i don't believe it becausei haven't been able to do it but anyway these guys over here, we've talked about thisa little bit earlier, just a basic sets of chisels.
there's a lot of timeswhen maybe the router bit gets into a corner and becauseof the shape of the bit you can actually get a squarecorner with a round bit. you may need something like a chisel to chop away that extra material. a basic set of chisels, you really shouldn't have to spend a whole lot of money on these. if you got the money
and you want to get areally, really nice set, by all means do it butis it truly necessary to get the job done? absolutely not. now if you have enough room and you're lucky enough to build what i would refer to as a big shop, you may want to get thingslike your table saw, your jointer, your planer, your bandsaw,
the sky is the limit, it really comes down to preference in a lot of cases. aside from all of the things that i said should be included in a small shop, that's where you want to start and then you want tomove on to the big tools. generally i consider thereto be four major tools that any large shops should have starting with your table saw.
(camera click) a really decent table saw is going to be the heart of your shop. then if you're going tobe milling your own wood, if you're going to take roughwood from the lumber dealer and you want to mill itdown to whatever size and you want it to be smooth, square in both sides, flat and parallel, you're going to need a planer and jointer.
the two of them, it's reallyhard if you just get one. they work best if you have them both. the fourth tool that i wouldrecommend is a bandsaw. a bandsaw is going to allow you to resaw really thick lumberdown to thinner boards. it's also going toallow you to make veneer and of course it's goingto allow you to cut curves and just be a cut off tool really but i do consider that tobe another essential tool.
from there again, sky is the limit. you can get the drum sander, drill press, oscillating spindle sander, it's just a ton ofthings and a lot of ways that these companies caneither spend your money. just be smart about your choices. you don't need to buy the best, just the basic tools will do but if you do have the room,
those are the four tools thati recommend starting with. i hope you've enjoyedour little shop tour. now if you have any questions, comments or any suggestionsfor future shows, please e-mail us at thewoodwhisperer@gmail.com and if you have any suggestions at all for how to get this salad dressing stain out of my shirt, i'd appreciate that too. i wish we'd have anotherepisode rolling out real soon
so check back off and spread the word. now, go build something would you. go build something. ♫ (lyrics) do you believe in love ♫ do you believe it's true ♫ do you believe in love ♫
