Marian's guide to the disorganized shop

Planer on scrap bin

 

I’m not much on New Year’s resolutions. This year I do have one that, I think, will make a difference to my work in the shop. I’ve never been a tidy creature and I’m never going to have the shop where every tool has its proper place and is in that place unless it’s in my hand. The shop has grown like a weed. If I get something new and there’s a space over here, that’s where it goes. The result is that I have clamps in 5 different places. I’m not sure I have the wall space to get all the clamps rounded up and put with their buddies so that’s not on the list for immediate attention.

What is on the list is to reorganize the shop so that I can spend a session, be it 10 minutes or a day in the shop without knocking anything on the floor. Because I don’t have a home for everything, tools, partial projects, notebooks and other bits and pieces tend to collect on whatever horizontal surface is not already covered. This means I’m often working in a small area with things piled up around and when I need to shift the position of something it bumps into its neighbour starting a chain reaction and what is on the outside of the bench ends up on the floor. I know that the idea of this is absolutely horrifying to some of you and others are nodding because, they too, use every bit of horizontal surface all the time.

Most of the time it doesn’t matter too much when things fall on the floor. I am aware of the tendency of my stuff to leap with very little warning so I make sure that tools don’t sit near the edges of the bench. I also built a lip on the back of one of the benches so that things couldn’t fall off the back. I did get a rather unpleasant surprise one day last week when I pulled out the shop vac and cyclone. In December I started work on a rod puppet with a papier mache head. Turns out I didn’t get very far before plans changed and I didn’t need to finish the construction. In order to make the head I thinned down some glue and put the left-over thin stuff in a pill bottle ready for the next day. When I found that I didn’t need to finish the head I tossed it and went on to other projects. I didn’t dump out the thin glue. At some point the bottle of glue made its way to the edge of the bench and then over the edge. I didn’t notice it at the time. What I did notice when I pulled out the shop vac cart was a nicely cured glop of glue right in front of the heating vent. It’s still there. I will have to take a chisel and very carefully pare it off the wooden floor. Wood glue sticks to wood floors. Who knew?

Making the shop leap-proof is not going to be easy or quick. I’m starting to look at what I use and what mostly collects dust. Earlier this year I gave my mitre saw to a friend about a week before I found myself doing all kinds of baseboard moulding. I could have used the miter saw but I made do with a cobbled-together miter box and a hand saw. Caulk covers up a multitude of sins. I’m not sorry I gave the saw away when I did. It’s been collecting dust for years and even though the baseboards without it was a bit inconvenient, it wasn’t worth having it collect dust for years to come just so I could get the baseboards done faster.

Flip-top model

Another machine I seldom use is my planer. It’s in an awkward spot and often the size of stock I’m working on falls under the minimum tolerances for safety, so I get out the hand planes. I’m not terribly efficient at preparing stock by hand and I think it may be time for me to make friends with the planer. If I can learn to use it the stock will likely be more consistently accurate and will take me less time. I was trying to figure out how I could get the planer into a position where it would be easier to use. I’ve seen guys make flip carts where they bolt one tool onto one side of a table top and another tool on the other side. The whole top pivots and locks so that when you’re using one tool the other one hangs upside down. I probably spent 4 or 5 days watching YouTube videos and then trying to decide which cart would best suit my needs. I wanted to put the planer on one side and my scroll saw on the other. There were various issues but after a lot of drawing, figuring, and even making a rather monstrous-looking model with cardboard and hot glue, it was time to actually start cutting wood. But first I had to get the scroll saw off the steel stand that came with it and get the planer off the shelf in the tool tower.

It wasn’t too hard to unbolt the scroll saw and put it on the bench and then to take out all the bolts in the stand and bundle up the steel pieces and the bolts and put them in the garage. I’m hoping someone will want a tool stand and I can pass it on to a new owner.

Getting the scroll saw out of its spot allowed me better access to the planer. I have a scrap bin on casters that has a lid because there are never enough horizontal surfaces. I checked the size of the planer and discovered that I could slide it off the shelf in the tool tower and onto the lid of the scrap bin. Once I did that, I saw that if I pushed it over, there was quite a bit of space between it and the tool tower. Could I cut down the size of the rolling platform, build a new stand for the scroll saw and have the tools side by side rather than stored on top of one another? Out came the tape measure, round went the wheels in my head and I decided to scrap the flip-top cart entirely. I now have a chunk of pipe that I was going to use for the pivot that I’ll have to find another use for. I’m sure I will eventually.

I was able to cut down the platform the scroll saw used to sit on so it will fit in between the tool tower and the planer. I have yet to build the stand for the scroll saw and I’ve been looking at YouTube videos of scroll saw stands. I’m not going to spend a long time on the ‘research’ aspect of this project. I want to get it done. A bonus of this latest plan is that I have removed the shelf on which the planer sat from the tool tower and that will give me a place to store my table saw sleds that have, to this point, been sitting on the floor - in the way. Another good thing is that I’m getting closer to uncovering the small lathe at the bottom of the tool tower. Richard has a large lathe and a lathe that can turn big things can also turn little things. I don’t know of many people who have two lathes and we certainly don’t need two.It already has a new home once I extract it from its current position.

Base for new scroll saw stand

In the next few days the scroll saw and the planer should be happily situated side by side and I’ll look around for other tools I can pass onto someone who will use them more than I will. As I said, I don’t expect my shop to ever be one of those where everything is immaculate but if I can cut down the number of things that leap off benches I will have made progress. Stay tuned.

January 6, 2021

One of the stories I used to teach was titled ‘The Broken Globe.’ This story by Henry Kreisel presents the conflict between a father and a son over whether the world is flat or round. The reaction of most of the kids was one of disbelief. Of course, the world is round. How could the old man be so stupid? I don’t think they really accepted my argument that both men were defending beliefs. The father walks out the door every morning and looks at the flat horizon of the Alberta prairie. A priest in Ukraine told him of a flat world when he was a boy and he trusted the priest as a representative of God and truth. The son believes in science and the round world as taught to him by a teacher he admires, a representative of truth. When the son brings home a globe to try to explain to his father the roundness of the world, the old man breaks the globe. My memory of the story is a bit sketchy and I don’t remember whether or not the boy tries to repair it.

The actions of Trump supporters today provide a perfect illustration of the strength and danger of beliefs when not handled in a calm and mature way. Statistical evidence only counts if someone is willing to accept its validity and Trump has expertly, in the view of his followers, called into question the validity of statistics and the workings of the American democracy. I will not likely forget the image of a bare-chested man with paint on his face and a horned helmet on his head striding triumphantly down a corridor in the capitol building after the mob had broken in. I will also remember the image of a man in a ball cap with his phone out, possibly taking a selfie, seated at the desk of an elected official. At the same time I think of the opposite. I think of Mr. Rogers: ‘Look for the helpers,’ for they are always there. I hope so. I hope they are legion and that they will respond with wisdom as yet unimagined. It’s going to take wisdom, patience, grace, and a huge roll of duct tape to repair this particular broken globe.