Popular Woodworking 2007-02 № 160, страница 31

Start by Identifying Tools You Need All the Time

For a lot of furnituremakers, the workbench is the hub of the shop, like a traffic circle through which every major road must pass. Dozens of tasks take place here: joinery is laid out and cut, lumber planed and sanded and furniture parts glued and assembled. We might even eat lunch here.

Given this central role for the workbench, one way to organize small tools is by gathering the ones you use most frequently and keeping them nearby. It's not hard to come up with a good list: chisels, planes, a square or two, a hammer or mallet, a marking knife (or a handful of sharp pencils), rules or measuring tapes, scrapers and more than likely a few other odds and ends.

These tools should be the first ones that are housed at or near the bench, within arm's reach of where you will be using them. Although it may take a little experimentation, when the

This traditional European workbench has more than a flat, sturdy top; drawers and cabinets provide abundant storage space for hand and portable power tools.

arrangement works you will know it. You should be able to reach for exactly the tool you need without spending any unnecessary time scouting for it and without moving your feet.

Tool collections can become more specialized as time goes on, forcing you to make decisions about which tools need a front-row seat and which can be relegated to more distant storage. For example, you may routinely need a block plane, a smoothing plane, a small rabbeting plane and a jointer. That's four planes you use frequently. But you use that old moulding plane you picked up at a flea market only once in a blue moon. Why clog up shelves or cabinets near the bench with tools you rarely need?

Racking up frequently used tools near the workbench keeps them close to their point of use and cuts down on wasted steps to distant cabinets or drawers.

Infrequently used tools may exist happily on a shelf in the corner of the shop, but their haphazard arrangement will make it tough to find the one you want to use and heaping tools together is an invitation to damage.

Virtually any tool category can use the same kind of attention. An adjustable square or try square is something you'll pick up a dozen times a day so keep it close at hand. But a framing square may not be used more than once a month so it can happily live on an overhead rafter or on a nail in the wall some distance away. A little common sense will go a long way in helping you identify what you need close at hand.

No one's list of "must haves" will be exactly the same. Every discipline has its own list of everyday tools, and those needs and habits will become evident with time in your shop as well.

A Tool Cabinet Keeps Important Tools Close

Thumb through any book about woodworking shops and you're likely to see all kinds of bins, shelves and cabinets that inventive woodworkers have devised to organize their tool collections. Browsing is an excellent way of getting ideas for your own shop. After all, few ideas are really brand-new.

But a common theme in many shops is a large, wall-mounted tool cabinet. Christian Becksvoort, a Maine artisan specializing in Shaker-style furniture, has just such a cabinet mounted on the wall behind his workbench. It's a beautiful piece of furniture in its own right, made from cherry, the wood that Becksvoort uses for virtually all of the furniture he makes.

More important, it holds many if not all of the bench tools he needs to make

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