Tools

My Work Space

This is my work space.

Here is my workbench. It is made from purple-heart, muteneye, and a small piece of black ebony.

Hand Tools

Chisels are used for everything. Paring wood, flushing overhangs, shaping, scraping, scoring, and cutting joinery. At some point in every project I use at least one chisel. This is my nicest chisel. I keep it razor sharp.	A block plane is a small plane with a low angle blade. I use it to plane edges, end-grains, and smaller areas other planes can't reach.
A Japanese style wooden hand-plane is pulled rather than pushed. This particular plane has a very heavy blade that is great for planing tropical woods. This will make wood look like silk if you use it right.	This is a #4 smoothing plane, in a special box I made for it. This plane will put a nearly flawless finish on wood if you keep it tuned up.
Where would any mathematician be without their trusty calculator?	This tool measures anything within a thousandth of an inch.
I use this hand-drill to fasten together all my jigs. I also use it for framing tool stands, and other construction projects around the shop.	Most people use a tape-gun for packaging. I like using this tool for tricky glue-ups and building jigs. It is one of the more useful tools I have, and most affordable. I recommend one for every wood-shop.
An adjustable square is used to check corners, and measure length. I use this tool a lot when I set up jigs.	A scraper is used to put a fine finish on difficult grained areas. It comes close to a smoothing-planes ability to put a fine finish on wood.
I frequently use a palm-sander to finish wood. It is powered on compressed air. It is an essential tool to have around any wood-shop.	I use water stones to sharpen my chisel and plane blades. The tool grinder is used to grind out a recess in the metal before sharpening. The cinder block is great for honing the water stones before use.

Machinery

I use a table-saw to cut down all wood to the right dimensions. This table-saw also has a router table built into the side. Router tables are what I use to shape and cut grooves into box parts.

A belt sander is great for sanding edges, and sides of boxes.

This is a sliding router table I built. It has a sliding sled that stays fixed to the table so the depth of cut is consistent. It also has a router mounted underneath at a 45-degree angle for cutting v-grooves. V-grooves make great mitered corners on boxes if they are done right.

A planer smoothes out rough lumber.

This heavy machine makes one side of a board flat. This is important, because you need a flat surface to reference the rest of your cuts.

I use this tool to cut rough lumber down to smaller pieces.

I also rent time on a wide-belt sander. This is a huge sander that flattens wood like a planer but also sands it smooth. It saves me a lot of time when I need to do finish work later in the project.

A special thanks to:

Piezo Hall

Dennis Loveland

Gavin O' Grady