Expert Wood working

Shop improvements updates and stop motion animation

One of the things I continually struggle with is routine maintenance and organizing in my shop. Since I produce a video and project every week, I tend to put a lot of this stuff on the back burner.

This week I had decided to just take some time to spruce up my shop and drag you along with me. So while I dont have one project to present, I hope you can pick up a tip or an idea from this video as I basically just putter around with five different things.

• I painted one of my OSB walls white. I ran out of paint, but will eventually get to my other walls. Ive been wanting to do this for ages because the OSB sheets make color correction difficult in my videos. The white paint really brightens up the shop.

• In addition to brightening up the walls, I bought three new daylight-balanced light fixtures to lighten up some dark holes in the shop. Each fixture holds four, 48" t-8 fluorescent bulbs. My shop almost glows at night! I installed two and still need to wire up the third.

• A few weeks ago a viewer sent me a Dust Deputy: its a type of sawdust and wood chip separator cyclone that works with a shop-vac.  For some reason, figuring out how to put it together caused me undue stress. Mostly because of my own impatience when it comes to assembling things such as this. In the end, I got it working with duct tape, and it does a great job! I even bought a new filter for my shop-vac. 

• I have a number of table saw sleds and jigs that I have never had a spot for. Instead, they sit on the floor, requiring me to constantly move them out of my way. My thought was to get them up on the wall, but I didnt want them to hog up a lot of space. What I came up with is hanging them from chains suspended from the ceiling. It looks a little funny, but it is very efficient and easy to use. 

• Lastly, I needed a storage system for my table saw accessories that seem to always be in various spots around the shop. Mostly where they are not handy or easy to find, which make me less likely to used them. I built a super-easy storage cabinet to hold everything in one place. It works well and took less than an hour to build. If you would like to make one like it, here are plans:

Woodworking animation

It seems like every woodworker on YouTube is incorporating stop-motion animation into his videos lately. Naturally, I am the type who desperately needs to jump onto trends, so I have incorporated my own animation into this video. (With all apologies to the stop-motion master, Frank Howarth.)

The other trend I see in woodworking videos is "super speed". Im not sure what this is all about: some videos seem to be on fast-forward throughout the entire video, like a 1914 Keystone comedy. Ill have to put this on my to-do list.

Audible.com

I am thrilled to have a new sponsor to the show: Audible.com. Please help support Woodworking for Mere Mortals (and free woodworking content)  by visiting them. Audible.com has over 100,000 audio books you can download and listen to wherever you go: great for listening to in the shop. The best part is they are letting viewers to WWMM download a free book just by visiting this link:

Audible.com/woodworking