Local chairs and woodworking in the Twin Cities

Workshop tour

Let’s take a look around my workshop!

Here’s my workbench, where I do most of my work. It’s built from Chris Schwarz’s Nicholson Workbench plans. I initially built it without the leg vise, but I quickly added a vise in after finding the bench hook in the plans to be insufficient. Most work is done up on the top surface, obviously, and I use holdfasts and the iron planing stop to keep work in place. For edge planing and some end grain work, the leg vise gets a lot of use. The holdfast holes in the front apron work to hold up long boards, while their front end is held in the vise.

Behind the workbench are these grey cabinets. The previous guy who worked in the shop I rent built them (he actually still works in this building, in a different shop down the hallway from me). They’re nicely constructed and painted. Mostly I keep hardware and lesser-used tools in them. And some snacks and bandages.

This is the toolchest and tool storage table. I built the toolchest after reading about the form on Schwarz’s blog. It stores all of my most commonly used tools: all the bench planes and handsaws, chisels, block planes, moulding planes, drilling tools and augurs, sharpening equipment, and so on. It sits on top of a table I built from cheap pine and plywood. The table has two lower shelves, where I keep my less commonly used tools, like joinery planes and some layout tools. I also keep my notebooks for sketching and notes down here.

Around the other side of the workbench is my bandsaw. It’s a nothing-special bandsaw from the 90s that I inherited from my dad. After he passed, I took it to my shop, thoroughly cleaned it, and got a new blade for it. I have a handful of blades for it, but for the most part I just use a 1/2″ Wood Slicer. Surprisingly for such a little machine, it’s perfectly capable of resawing at max capacity, a bit over 6″.

And filling out the rest of the space is this big 8’x4′ assembly table. This is where I do glueups and store pieces in progress as they’re being built. In this picture it’s holding a table top I was building and a sideboard I’m working on. It’s also where I eat lunch, when I’m having a meal at the shop. To one side of the table is a coat rack and bin for spare offcuts, and on the other side is my pile of cherry lumber, waiting to be used. And up above the table is my bookshelf of woodworking reference books.