I did manage to complete some projects in my workshop this year. Well, by “complete” I mean get them to 97% complete – but I feel that’s a given. I started off, quite illogically, with a project to filter the smaller wood particles out of the air in the workshop. Illogical, because I really wasn’t making any dust to filter, and when I did make some during this project, of course it wasn’t ready. However, my thinking was that it would get get two things off the floor and a bunch of battery chargers off my side bench.
Workshop Air Filter
When we had our furnace replaced, I asked the installers to leave me the blower cage, which they did, and this became one of the things on the floor. The new furnace also came with 5″ thick filters, which cost an arm and half a leg to replace, so of course I couldn’t throw the old ones out. The workshop filter re-uses a dirty filter (which was also sitting on the floor) and provides a surface on which to store and use my thickness planer. I wanted to be able to set a timer for say three hours and leave the fan running, without me having to remember to turn it off, and that generated the next idea, which was to mount the battery chargers for my drills and garden tools on the end of the filter, and these too can be managed by the timer to avoid over-charging. Whether they actually need to be on a timer is irrelevant, and besides, they are off the bench. This project worked out quite well, and only needs a safety grill installed on the output side to be complete. But that needs a router table.
Router Table
Which, coincidentally, was my next project. Back in 2014, I had carved the right size of hole for a router plate in a 1.5″ thick slab of melamine covered particle-board (an ex-table-top I found at the Habitat re-use store) and never got any further. This was possibly because I had tried it out clamped to a bench top and found I had to turn the rpm way down to avoid nasty vibration. Anyway, this summer I completed a table on which to mount said slab, and worked out how to capture most of the dust by using two hoses to the dust collector. I also made a router fence which incorporated a couple of modifications of my own design.
It turned out that the vibration went away once the table was on a solid support, so I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out. I still would like to add some pull-out drawers to store the router bits and accessories, but this project is ready to go.
Except that I have no place to put it, because it’s so darned big – one of the down sides of designing something in an office one floor away from where it will be used!
Router table and fence
The wonderful thing about a workshop is that it generates a never-ending supply of things that need to get done to make it function better. I’ve decided that I’m OK with that. When I feel the need to create something, I can go down there and do so, and if the only reason for doing so is because I want to, that’s fine too. And it provides a place where I can take Travis and show him how to drill holes, cut things and make them smooth. Maybe one day he’ll build his own router table and actually make something useful on it.
Meanwhile, I have a safety grill for the dust collector to make sometime. When I feel like it.
