Shop Photos

Here are photos of some of my woodworking equipment, some of the more unusual pieces. I have in addition to the machines shown below: an old Ropckwell 6x48 sander that gets used an awful lot, a Bridgewood open ended 15" wide belt sander, a Grizzly 6 x 89 sander that gets used for bigger cutting board edges and flush sanding, a shop built 16" disc sander I built back in 1984 , and old 9 x 9 balloon sander useful for shaping pulls and such, a cruddy Chinese floor drill press that has done the job for me since 1983, a Grizzly 3 HP dust collector coupled with an Oneida cyclone, cobbled together before the spiffy systems sold now were available. I hang the impeller and bags from the ceiling to save a little floor space.

This is a 17" Atlantic Works jointer that goes back over 100 years. I bought it on Ebay, in 2008, and had Byrd Cutter make me a carbide spiral insert head to fit the jointers original babbit bearings. So the jointer is a nifty combination of 19th and 21st century technology, skipping the 20th altogether.It's a bit underpowered for wide work with its 2 hp single phase motor, but it can joint wide pieces when asked, and I don't have to constantly start a big motor to joint the small pieces I usually work with. It's a joy to use. The spiral head is virtually tear free. This jointer was likely used to build battleships when it was new, a bit of "beating our swords into plowshares."

This is a huge Bridgewood 24" planer from the early 80"s, again purchased on Ebay. It weighs over a ton. I replaced its head with a Byrd head, and swapped out the big 3 phase motor for a 3 HP single phase, again a little underpowered for wide work, but light cuts will do the job for the few times I work with wider pieces, and I kept things simple with the single phase power available to me. I run the planers original three phase feed motor off a high tech frequency inverter that gives me an infinite direct dial variable speed on the feed. I also fitted an inexpensive digital read out that reads in 1/1000 th of an inch increments. I replaced the segmented infeed with a polyurethane roller to avoid smoosh marks on lighter cuts on softer woods. This planer also has powered bed rollers along with the feed rollers, which isn't as helpful as I"d hoped for, and especially narrow work still has an annoying tendency to get stuck in mid feed at times. All in all, I can't say the extra work and expense were worth it over the 20" Grizzly (again, fitted with a Byrd head, and a small brush motor for feed giving me variable speed) I used for many years. This planer does however do a terrific job of dampeneing vibration, especially nice for planing end grain cutting boards.

This contraption is a CNC router/joinery machine I built over a span of several months in 2008. In this photo the spindle is horizontal, the way I would use if for cutting dovetails or mortise and tenon work. The water cooled three phase spindle, driven through a frequency inverter, can be manually set to any angle between horizontal and vertical (45 degrees allows for a nifty way to cut dovetail grooves for butterfly splined mitres), and I constantly change back and forth from horizontal to vertical. The machine was built from linear motion bearings and ball screws bought used on Ebay, along with a frame from 20/20 aluminum extrusions bolted together, all on a wooden cabinet stand, with a laminated birch plywood table bolted to an aluminum subtable. I spent about $2,000 for initial set up not including software. For that I useVectrics' Vcarve Pro, now replaced with Aspire, and they're really worth the significant price if you want to go from knowing nothing about CADCAM to banging out quality work in a hurry, as I did. The gridwork of grooves on the table allows me to use rubber gasket with a vacuum pump to hold down even small pieces (as small as 2" x 4" or so) with no additional clamping, and the aluminum t channel allows the use of cam clamps and hold down toggle clamps when possible and required. This machine has required an immense investment of time, and lots of frustration in the early months and in building it. There are now inexpensive CNC machines out there for hobbyists, and Shopbot's Buddy is similar capacity to what I built (without the spindle tilt feature) but the benefit of building your own is you know how to fix anything that goes wrong, and it was built for the purposes I had in mind. There aren't many woodworkers who have both the basic machine skills that my 25 years of preCNC experience provided me with, and the self-taught "mastery" that building my own CNC for commercial use has given me. So there are many projects, especially at small to midscale size, including multiples, that I can produce at higher quality and lower price than shops much bigger than mine.