Let's start with the cast of characters. If you click here you will see me, SWMBO, and the "Killer Brown Dogs of Death." We are sitting on the deck that I built a few years ago. At the time the deck was built I also installed the patio door shown behind us. If were to stand on our deck and look out from our deck to the South, you would see my garden and Lake Jane. To the left and the right of the garden I planted 2400 daffodil bulbs in an 8 foot by 130 foot long strip. Here is a photo of the daffodils as the camera is looking from West to East towards our neighbor's house. The wire over the top of the flowers is to keep the dogs from walking on the plants.

If you look in my garage you will see one of the racks that I use to store wood for woodworking. The bottom shelf contains red and white oak. The second shelf contains ash (5/4) that I bought at an auction for real cheap. The next level up is reserved for maple. The top shelf contains some of the cherry and walnut (hidden by shadows) that I am hording. The cherry was bought at a mill in Wisconsin for $3.50/bd ft.

Ok, so the woodworkers are getting anxious so let's head to the workshop. Here is a view of the basement shop as you enter. The door in the back is part of shop leads to the envelope part of our house. We have a passive solar heated house (woodstove also used for some heat) and as such we have no furnace. That rumor about Minnesota being cold is just a myth. It keeps out the riff-raff. I have a woodstorage rack located behind that door and it serves as a secondary rack to the one in the garage. One can never have too much wood on hand. You will notice the mechanic's type tool boxes in the photo. I keep everything pretty well locked up. The greenlee tool boxes shown under the SCMS stand in this photo are also used for tool storage. I keep all my smaller power tools in these boxes. The red tool box in the first photo (on the left) is actually dedicated to measuring tools. I have so many measuring and marking tools that I decided it was just better to put them in one place. The workbench in the foreground is currently being built by me. Its top is a slab of cherry 5" thick that I glued up from individual boards.

Here is another view of the shop, this time looking more towards the back of the shop. I have a 10" makita sliding compound mitre saw attached to a stand that I built. Behind the stand is a nice shelf that is 24" deep that provides me with a great place to put all those cutoff pieces that are too small for the normal storage racks. The problem is that this rack fills up really fast and it begins to look bad. The rest of the photos contains my Unisaw, Star 8" jointer (behind Unisaw), Delta 12.5" planer (also behind Unisaw) and a Delta 1.5 Hp shaper (in front left of photo under the radio). I bought the shaper and a 1.5 Hp router table (Porter-Cable) at an auction for about 1/3 the cost of new. Both tools had never touched wood so they were brand new.

Some of you are saying by now "hey, wait a minute, this is a woodworking shop, and yet there is not dust?!?" Well, dust has been outlawed in this shop, and here is the system that makes sure that all laws pertaining to dust are enforced. It is a Jet DC1900 with Oneida-Air's high efficiency filtration bags. I also have a cyclone from Oneida that removes 99.9%+ of the dust from the air before it reaches the filtration bags. Here is another shot of the cyclone and the other parts of the system. To empty the dust that is collected I simply remove the fiber drum and dump out the chips and dust. This is far easier than emptying those darn dust collector bags. The dust collector system is connected to metal ductwork that is connected to each and every tool. I have about 15 blast gates on the system so I catch dust as soon as it is created wherever it is created. If we go back to one of the earlier photos we can see an overhead filter that I buiit. This filter system catches the really fine dust that escapes the high efficiency bags. I have virtually not dust in my shop at all. Another tool that help at grabbing extraneous dust is the blade guard that I built for the table saw. I even included some rough plans of the blade guard so those of you that would like to copy it can.

So that about covers the general tour of the shop. For a complete listing of all the photos you can turn here. Pretty soon I will be able to stop organizing my shop and finish my workbench and then I can start to make some useful items.