Woodworking Shop Showcase
Here's a no-clamp way to add a sacrificial rabbet-cutting fence to your saw's regular fence.
Dwayne Ackerman custom-designed these holders so items could hang on a wall.
We all have to start somewhere. This young woodworker proves you don't need a lot of space to equip a functional shop-just some ingenuity.
The analogy of "10 pounds of potatoes crammed into a 5-pound bag" accurately describes Jeff Gabel's old life, where he squeezed three cars into a detached garage.
When this solder had to trade motorcycle thrill-riding for a wheelchair, he jumped into woodworking with both feet.
It took Mike Connolly and friends a long weekend in 2002 to raise the frame of his workshop near Concord, New Hampshire. Four years later it's still not done, and Mike couldn't be happier.
More than 100 woodworking shops & garages, including complete floor plans and pointers for optimizing your own workspace.
Fred Collins got his introduction to woodworking as a youngster, working for his homebuilder father. Add that to a 30-year career as an industrial arts teacher and there isn't much that Fred doesn't know about the tools of his trade.
Whether Tom Clark is assembling cabinets in his 2,400-square-foot workshop or gazing at the stars through a 1,500-pound telescope that he built, it's always a question of space.
Need help planning a new workshop? Or maybe you've got the urge to reorganize the one you have now. Either way, you've come to the right place. In this shop you'll discover how we took a 14x28' bare-bones room and remodeled and outfitted it into the sensational, featured filled woodworking center shown here. Use any of the ideas you like -- after all, we built this shop just for you.
We took a standard 24x24' double-car garage and designed the space to accommodate a nifty shop and the team had to think mobility, double duty, comfort, security, and cost. But in the end, one great similarity with our first effort stands out: bunches of terrific, easily adaptable ideas!
The emphasis in this 12x16' basement shop was to squeeze in all the tools and machines needed for a complete workshop and still provide room to move around. Can you imagine how crowded the space would be if all the machines were on separate stands? The other challenge was to take care of the dust as quietly as possible.
For this shop we started with a third stall of a three-car garage, a feature found in many newer homes. You may not have this type of garage at your house. That's okay. Wherever you place your shop, we know you'll find a whole world of great ideas in this one that you can easily put to use.
Dale Heisinger's Orcas Island, Washington, workshop isn't much bigger than the half of the two-car garage where he used to work. But his new 16x24' shop is so much better.
Dave Estopinal chased a dream for 32 years. Now, at age 50, he's living it in his recently finished 30x60' workshop 75 miles east of Los Angeles.
When Iowa woodworker Rod Cox added a workshop to the back of his cramped two-car garage (his old workshop), he had one thing in mind--elbow room.
An ample number of high-intensity fluorescent lights provide illumination for close-in operations that demand a high degree of accuracy. Several windows provide natural light. A 3-hp cyclone dust collector helps keep tools and workshop clean.
Measuring 32x48', Dale Toms' Bedford, Virginia, workshop is pretty good size. It has to be, because Dale needs the space to put all the tools he has acquired since he and his wife, Debbie, made an arrangement 16 years ago.
There's not a lot of space and not a lot of money invested in tools, but Keith Schwartztrauber's Las Vegas shop features innovative fixtures that pack a lot of woodworking punch into a small area.
Every day spent building out his garage meant another day away from the pleasure of working on his cars. To avoid the mess of drywall mud and sanding, Craig Woodruff chose easy-install products for the walls and ceilings.
Outside Elizabeth, Colorado, on the eastern slope of the Rockies, John Herboldsheimer's 18'x28'6'" workshop lacks a view but not much else.
This Idea Shop occupies a 12x20' building connected to the garage by a covered portico. The shop's 9' ceiling has three powered, venting skylights, each operated electronically. Those, plus four windows, French doors, and a pastel color scheme add natural light and a sense of spaciousness in what otherwise might feel like tight quarters.
Nestled in the forest on a shore of Lake Chelan in central Washington State, Mike Walker's 1,670-square-foot workshop is the epitome of organization.
Show off images of your woodworking shop by posting them in our Shop Gallery!
The editors of WOOD are always on the lookout for shops to feature in our magazines. Visit this page for submission details.
Where's your getaway? The editors of WOOD are looking for a few photogenic man spaces for future publications. Visit this page for submission details.
A sixteen foot high wall of signs is the result of twenty-five years of collecting.
Winter can be brutal in Lafayette, Indiana, but Dave Shively doesn't care. He's out in his workshop custom-building cabinets or furniture -- in his shirtsleeves.
Convenience, cost, and saving space were on Dan McNair's mind when he designed and built his collapsible, mobile workshop.
Starting with a blank slate, we created a dream shop with down-to-earth ideas you can apply in your shop.
Anderson, S.C., a city with Southern charm, boasts one spot with a touch of New England.
Safety was the priority when Erik Jorgensen designed his one-man, high-volume production workshop.
With a shop full of jigs, mobile tools, and a crane for moving heavy objects, you might say this Wisconsin shop is a real back saver.
Jack Olsen had to find a way to make this 440-sq-ft garage work as a metal shop, a wood shop, and an auto shop-all without any room to expand and only $1,000 to cover the upgrades.
Each year, we build more than 60 projects for upcoming issues of WOOD magazine. Building each project in our own shop allows us to verify the drawings and work within shouting distance of the editors and designers. But, with so many projects and two project builders, the working space in our main shop was getting a bit tight. To solve the problem, we renovated an 18x20' area in the basement of our building to be used as both a workshop and photo studio. Here's a glimpse of what we've done.
Jim's woodworking trailer hosts numerous tool stations allowing him to take his mobile shop on the road.
