The Workshop Book
The Landmark Study of the Woodworkers Shop

By Scott Landis

Here is a meticulously presented study of the workshop. Scott Landis traveled all over North America to discover the workshops featured in this book. The result is a visually stunning book that is as practical as it is beautiful.

Landis shows you how you can create your own woodworking sanctuary in whatever space you can afford. With the help of hundreds of drawings and photographs, The Workshop Book takes a systematic approach to:

• Storage for tools, lumber and supplies
• Heat, light and electricity
• Where to put benches and machines
• Dust collection
• Shop security and personal safety
• Making the most out of the workspace you have

Introduction:

Late one fall about 15 years ago, on a secluded island in northwest Ontario, I installed my first workshop. With the help of a few friends, I dismantled half of a tumbledown icehouse that once served a commercial fishing camp, long since abandoned. The salvaged lumber and painstakingly unbent nails found their way into the walls of my new shop, which I carved out of the other half. Like the rest of the original icehouse, the 2x4 stud-frame walls were insulated with sawdust and the outer walls were sheathed in tar paper. Brown kraft building paper beneath the interior planking kept the bulk of the sawdust from drifting into the shop as it settled.

Double-glazed windows were out of the question, so I simply removed a horizontal swath of boards along most of the length of the south and west walls, and stapled heavy plastic inside and out. I used driftwood and old 2x6s to build my workbench along the wall beneath the windows and to construct a small sleeping loft above the door at the east end of the building. In the wintertime, the building's footings and shallow shed roof were banked with snow; toward spring I hung boxes inside the windows to start seedlings.

The shop was nothing fancy, but for the better part of two years I was happily ensconced, making snowshoes, knives and other artifacts of northern life, sometimes writing about the process. The nearest utility pole was about 5 mi. away by water, so I relied entirely on hand tools. I worked mainly during the daytime, now and then (and especially in the winter) supplementing the natural light from the windows with kerosene and gas lanterns. Heat was more than amply provided, even at temperatures well below 0F, by a cast-iron woodburning furnace that had been set ashore on the island under rather mysterious circumstances some 30 years earlier. The ganglion heat-exchanger on top of the burner was so effective that I was roused more than once in the middle of the night to quench its ardor. Groggy with sleep, I stumbled down the ladder from the loft to fling open the dull-red door and dump a bucket of snow inside.

I eventually moved on, abandoning the shop and the island that had been deserted when I arrived. Since then, I have visited hundreds of workshops, almost all of them more sophisticated and better equipped than my own. I worked for a while in six or eight of these shops and shared bench space in a few. But apart from the wilderness workshop that I occupied so long ago, I have never had my own place.

Perhaps I can credit the brief life span of my shop with the fact that I still remember the delicious agonies of decision making that attended every detail of its construction. How wide to make the door and on which side to mount the hinges? How high to make the bench and should I bolt the vise through the top or lag-screw it from below? Where to hang the tools and the other inventory I hoped to acquire in the near future? Decades later, such mundanities may seem trivial, but they were hardly so at the time.

Unsophisticated does not mean crude. Although my workshop was greatly simplified by a lack of electricity and machinery, it was no less thoughtfully organized than many more heavily equipped shops. Likewise, a simple workshop is in no way an impediment to good work. Simon Watts reminded me of how a down-to-earth Nova Scotia boatshop inspired his own `back-to-basics' conversion (described in Chapter 2). The shop's owner, Jim Smith, turned out a fine working skiff every six days -- with the aid of no more than an old bandsaw, an electric grinder and a hand-held drill. Coming from a fully outfitted Vermont furniture shop, Simon found it to be "an absolute eye-opener."

Most of us recognize the value of a clean, well-lit work place, even if we cannot always claim one for ourselves. We wear our shops -- as well as our homes -- like an old jacket or a favorite sweater, and since most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work, it ought to fit well. We breath the air and rely upon the light and heat it provides for our comfort, efficiency and survival. If it doesn't reflect our needs and priorities, we are bound to be miserable.

Five years ago, when I embarked upon an exploration of workbenches (which culminated in The Workbench Book, published by The Taunton Press in 1987), there was no such concensus of opinion about their importance. Wherever I traveled for that project, I felt compelled to explain--often to politely quizzical silence--what was so engaging and important about so pedestrian an object as a workbench.

The process, as it turned out, revealed a lot about the way the workbench intersects the background and personality of the woodworker who builds and uses it. It also pointed the way to the broader subject of the workshop. Indeed, as a tool, a working environment and a reflection of its maker, the workshop is an obvious extension of the bench. Many of the same functional considerations and traditions that find expression in the workbench have an important role to play in the shop.

To gather the material in this book, I retraced my steps to a few of the most intriguing and well-considered shops I discovered on my original workbench hunt. And I visited dozens more, professional and amateur alike. In the process, I took a close look at the basic systems that constitute most modern workshops: electricity, lighting, heating, wood storage, dust collection and sharpening, among others. And I asked the shop owners to explain how they selected and located equipment in order to foster efficient work flow and safety. Our discussions went beyond the normal range of power tools -- table saw, jointer, drill press, etc. -- to include the workbench and tool chest, as well as the requirements for assembly and finishing. The workshop, I soon discovered, is not a static creature. Like the workbench and the craftsman who uses it, the shop constantly evolves to accommodate the changing needs of its occupant.

I also found that if you ask any six woodworkers about their shop or tools, you are likely to get at least six different answers. At a recent forum on the guitar-maker's workspace, moderator Jeff Elliott noted that the six panelists had a total of more than 130 years of workshop experience and still, he said, "we don't know where to put the bandsaw."

It will be no surprise, then, that the workspaces I've included here vary widely, from snugly efficient basement shops to cavernous cabinetshops. There are lavish, well-appointed shops alongside workspaces choked with salvaged machinery and shoehorned into garages, chicken coops and pantries. I even found some wonderful oddball "shops," among them a condensed tool kit designed to be carried on the back and a turning shop that travels on the bumper of an RV. Some of the shops in this book may approach the ideal, while others border on the improbable. The most creative solutions won't satisfy every palate, but they all share a common ingredient -- they work.

This is not a recipe book. Unlike a workbench, a workshop is never built and outfitted from a set of plans. Although lots of information may be gleaned from the floor plans and drawings in the book, they are perhaps more valuable as inspiration than as blueprints. Likewise, the mention of specific machinery is not intended to recommend one product over another. There is plenty of excellent equipment on the market -- new or used, expensive or dirt cheap--and I have made no attempt to evaluate individual brands. For more specific information, either about brand performance or the intricacies of installing, maintaining or overhauling machinery, refer to the sources listed in the Bibliography.

As you think about your shop, don't be intimidated by all the choices confronting you. Many of us feel compelled to research our equipment to death in our quest for quality. Anything less is, well, less than perfect. We tend to disparage those who work in a hovel with a handful of worn-out tools, but let Art Carpenter's biodegradable workshop be a lesson. Like the bodybuilder's physique, when the workshop becomes a monument to our obsession, it ceases to be a means to an end and becomes the end in itself. For some people I visited, the workshop is obviously their ultimate creative expression. Never mind what goes on inside.

The measure of a workshop, I found, is far greater than the sum of its parts. Some of my favorite shops are infused with a sense of personality, a character that derives as much from the placement of tools, the music on the radio and the pictures on the wall as from any ingenious jig or fixture. Stripped of that personality, what's left?

I sensed this most strongly when I visited Carlyle Lynch in Broadway, Virginia, not long before he died at the age of 80. I sat in a chair at the foot of Carlyle's bed, listening to his reflections on a rich lifetime as a maker and teacher of woodworking. Behind the house, his sprawling two-story workshop lay idle, and he would never work there again.

Between our sporadic chats (Carlyle wasn't up to much more), I wandered through the shop, wondering about the work and life that had once thrived there. Without Carlyle's presence, the benches, chests, and countless fixtures -- even the tools and machinery -- seemed like so many bolts and board feet. The future of the shop's contents is uncertain. But whether the tools are kept together or dispersed to other craftsmen who might give them new life, it was clear that the shop could never really be called Carlyle's again.

One final confession: As I write this book, I am "between shops." My last official workshop was a cavernous space on the second floor of a Toronto industrial building. I was flanked on either side by colorful tenants -- a Korean sweatshop to the east, from whence emanated the singsong whirr of a battery of sewing machines and pungent cooking smells, and a fly-by-night wood-finishing outfit to the west, which generated fumes of much greater concern. Since then, I have shared a group workshop and borrowed space in friends' shops and barns, as the need arose.

Most of my tools are now in boxes, or on loan to friends. My workbench has been rudely decommissioned, its Record face vise removed so as not to interfere with the flow of perforated paper to the computer printer it now supports. A rack of files sits on the opposite end of the bench and directly beneath them, under the tail vise, is the metal filing cabinet that contains the grist for this book. The whole business is within arm's reach of my chair and computer keyboard.

It's a sordid affair, I'll admit, hardly befitting someone who has spent as much time as I have peering through the windows of other people's shops. But in a way, the odyssey that became this book was a personal quest to discover those elements of the workspace that I will eventually include in my own. As I might have predicted at the start, I stumbled upon no ultimate design, no single solution to the myriad problems of tool selection and organization. But the material I've set between these covers, gleaned from all the shops I visited, will help me greatly when it comes time to recommission my workbench and get back to making shavings. I hope it does as much for you.

Table of Contents:

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Workshop Tradition

Chapter 2 Locating the Workshop

Chapter 3 Layout

Chapter 4 Machinery

Chapter 5 Systems: The Workshop Envelope

Chapter 6 Specialty Shops

Chapter 7 Dream Shops

Chapter 8 Storage

Chapter 9 Fixtures

Bibliography

Sources of Supply

Index

Credits

Soft-cover, 9 x 11 in., 234 pages with over color photos and drawings
Published 1998

ISBN: 978-1-56158-271-6