View of the south side, where I keep my hand tools, power tools and small items like pen parts.Also stored over there are special jigs and fixtures used in special applications. My drill press is a frequently used piece of equipment, as is the vacuum cleaner.
North side of the shop has equipment that generate large amounts of sawdust. I have an industrial dust collection system with intake tubing running along the entire length of the wall. Each piece of equipment has its own intake port. Equipment includes a chop saw, planer, lathe, tablesaw, router table and on the far end, my homemade thickness sander.
My most recent addition to the shop is this Delta thickness planer. When building segmented bowls, the built up rings must be exactly flat. Before I bought the planer, that job was done on my small thickness sander, taking hours for each ring. This does the job in less than a minute.
Buying a full size lathe was a big step for me. All the lathes I read about on the woodworking websites were recommending lathes priced over $2000. Way out of my range. I found this lathe at Harbor Freight for less than $200 and find it to be a great lathe. It has as many or more features than lathes priced over $2000.
I use four basic lathe tools. From left to right, a 5/8" Fingernail gouge (so named because the cutting tip is shaped like a finglernail), A Sorby Offset bowl scraper (used to reach inside a bowl), a Parting tool and the heavy Bowl Scraper.
Necessity is the Mother of invention, so when I needed a disk sander I simply mounted a disk on my lathe. A couple chunks of redwood and a piece of scrap make the table top and voila...a disk sander.
This picture shows one of the really cool features of the lathe. Being able to rotate the head, allows me to make objects that would be otherwise too big. Here I'm making a serving platter.
With my new lathe in service, I could then dedicate my old mini lathe to make a thickness sander. I used Peg's rolling pin (sorry Peg) mounted between the head stock and tail piece, to hold sandpaper. I then built a box with an adjustable platen and a sliding piece to hold the work. It works great except that it doesn't have a lot of power. Which is okay, because I have lots of time to nurse it through.
