TOOLS, EQUIPMENT, AND MATERIAL

• SHEET MATERIAL
• SOLID WOOD STOCK

I bought my first Black and Decker portable saw 40 years ago and I have owned a number of them since. My last is about ten years old and I hate it. That is about the only comment I will make about that.

Some of you may be interested in some of the larger equipment we have in our shop that probably most home workshops do not posses.

Before we moved into the log home with a shop we had space for my 10 foot sliding table saw. Ten horse main motor with a one horse motor on the scoring blade. This was the ultimate saw for anyone that likes woodworking. I could straight line rip lumber, cut sheets of stock 5' x 10', and I never even slowed it down. We ripped 5 sheets of 3/4" medium density fibre board at one time. One of our operations was to rip sheets into 4 inch wide strips. Two men could cut 40 sheets and put it away in the rack in 1 1/2 to 2hrs. We have a smaller version here at home, the table slides 56 inches and has a new 5 horse motor that runs the scoring blade also. This saw will accomodate a 12 inch saw blade and does okay with the new 5 HP motor. The big saw used a 16" blade and cut just slightly less than 1/4" kerf.

We have need to sand pieces of stock that are only 7 inches long and this is difficult to do with most powered wide belt sanders. We talked to so many manufacturers concerning what we needed to do. None of them wanted to do anything for us until I finally found a man that owns his company. When I told him what I wanted to do he said I'll build you one. That was the saga that led to one of the most fascinating pieces we have. It is small by most standards. We can sand material up to 24 1/2 inches wide and as long as you want. I have adjusted the machine to sand accurately enough that it will remove a pencil mark from a piece of veneer and not sand thru. The machine has a ten horse motor and will take material 4 1/2 inches thick. We positively could not do without it. I glue-up door panels and run them twice usually and it is always exactly the same.

We use a dust vacuum that has three plastic bags on the bottom that weigh about 150 pounds when 2/3 full. There are 3 cloth bags on top also. It is 7 1/2 horse. I am sure that I done someone wrong sometime in my life to have to remove the plastic bags. It is definitely the dirtiest job anyone could ever have to do in the shop.

We have an old 12" Craftsman Bandsaw with a cast iron table (had two). These were some of the best saws made but they have cheapened them in the last several years. Our 20" bandsaw is a Powermatic. Does a nice job and has lots of power. We used bandsaws to cut small letters for puzzles for years. Had a girl right from high school that sat on a stool in front of the bandsaw for eight hours a day for about 4 years. She could cut letters for an average length name in about 45 seconds. My wife could do it in 40 seconds.

I kept the powermatic shaper with 3/4" spindle, not real heavey duty but it does the job.

My jointer-planer is a Delta, replacing an old 6" Craftsman. The Delta is a good general purpose machine but they put an open end "cheapoo" motor on them which makes them very under powered.

I bought a Dewalt Radial Arm Saw in the Sixties and gave it to the UPS driver when we moved the shop. He took it to a service shop for a check-up and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. We have sold or given away all of our Radial Arm Saws. Unless you can substantiate spending $1500 to $2000 for a Radial saw don't bother, they are junk.

RANDOM ORBIT SANDER
We have a Porter Cable 6" random orbit. Good sander. I haven't had any trouble with the "gouging" so many have complained about with these sanders.

BISCUIT CUTTER
The Dewalt Biscuit cutter is a good machine also. These little machines are tricky to use. You have to concentrate on where you're cutting and if you have the base plate resting flat on the material. Please clamp the material you are slotting when using these machines.

PORTABLE ROUTERS
I am partial to Porter Cable Routers. We have had Milwaukee, Craftsman, Black and Decker, and several others. We have a 3 1/2 HP PC router that is variable speed and you can use 1/4", 3/8", or 1/2" shafted bits. This router has a soft start feature that is great. This thing has torque that would knock it right our of your hands. We also have a 1 1/2 HP PC router with pistol grip handle. Love this one too. Has ample power to do most work and isn't nearly as heavy as the big one. We also have three smaller routers we use for trimming laminate.

POWER MITRE BOXES
We have a 12" Dewalt with the compound mitre feature. Good saw but like most power mitre boxes it vibrates too much to suit me. I tried making precise mitre cuts for some doors that I made and it was a real bear. We have a chopper knife trimmer to make perfect mitres, made in Taiwan I believe. The originals were made in the USA and were very accurate, the one we have needs adjusting all the time.

TWELVE INCH PLANER

A Delta 12 1/2" planer is used seldom anymore, they are okay but as usual they are very under powered.

The costliest investment we ever made in our lives, including the house, has it's very own spot in the shop. A two head, one drill, with vacuum hold-down table, computer controlled router. We bought this equipment in 1987. It was obsolete 6 months after we bought it but we are still using it and do things that was unheard of when we bought it. A lot of companies and sales people don't tell you when you buy this type of equipment that you need a lot of other things to make it work. I just happened to be nosey enough to know what we were getting into but I didn't necessarily tell my wife everything. The machine needed about $35,000 in computer equipment, a $10,000 vacuum pump for the table,software, and a fairly large air compressor. Oh yes, I had to go to school for a week to learn how to run it. That didn't do it. I spent the next 3 to 6 months screwing-up a lot of material until becoming proficient enough to really know what I was doing. Then I wrote programs for it etc.

Routers like this always run and cut at a steady rate. The bits are made specifically for them and are relatively expensive when compared to what I remember paying when I was building houses all the time. I have $3,000 to $4,000 dollars in bits pretty much all the time. Almost all of them are solid carbide spiral cutters although I obviously have a lot of other types. When our business was at it's largest I bought 100 bits per month at $17.00 each of one kind. I have them from 1/16 inch diameter to 3 or 4 inches. The bits we use now cost $30 each wholesale from the maqnufacturer.

ROTO-PHASE (phase conversion from single phase electric to 3 phase)
I am sure that there must be a lot of you woodworkers etc. that have considered the use of a phase converter or some of you may never have heard of them.
Our new home shop doesn't have 3phase electric available so we had to install a "Roto-Phase". In all my years around electrical equipment I had never had to install this type of equipment and I got a education real quick.
We have the CNC Router and control to run and they are susceptible to voltage changes and "drops". The machine would't run. We found after 3 days of sweating blood that we would have to start the motors on the spindles before starting the computer control. Also found that if we started the wide belt sander it knocked the computers off-line. We had to help pay for the 3 phase connection to our last shop and this can run into thousands of dollars.

SHEET MATERIAL:

Some of you are confused by the types and varieties of materials available for the home shop. We use medium density fibre board with melamine on both sides and we also use the material raw(without veneer). Everybody that builds cabinets these days uses some particle board. We use a lot of board from Canada. It is of excellent quality and you have to get on a list to obtain it. Melamine is another product we use a lot of. This is a particle board covered with a very light weight laminate and when you see smooth interiors in commercial cabinets, in colors as well as white, they most likely used melamine. I don't use any staples or nails in my cabinets or furniture,screws and glue only. Some fine trim I use an air powered brad gun.

I have built many tables for recreation centers etc., we make those tops from particle board that is 1 1/4 inches thick. Very Heavy, but the public don't seem to tear them up. Of course we laminate them with "perrty" colors. We also use latex glue instead of the old stinky solvent type for the laminate.

SOLID SURFACE MATERIAL
We haven't used a lot of the solid surface material but I experimented with it on the router and accomplished some interesting effects. It is too expensive for the average homeowner to have in their home but it sure is popular anyway.

SOLID WOOD I have a pretty good selection of solid wood at any given time in stock. We manufacture a childs stool that the legs and support section is made from soft maple. We have used sugar pine,mahogany,and alder for these also. Red Oak, maple,white pine,yellow pine,poplar,cyprus,black walnut, cherry and some sugar pine (we used to get pieces of this 1 1/8 inches thick 16 to 20 feet long and the narrowest boards would be 18 inches wide, some to 20 to 30 inches) no knots, and absolutely too beautiful to cut. I still have a few pieces.

...Keep trying!