How to Set Up a Wood Shop That Works for You - Free PDF Tool Included

Welcome to the new wood shop, guys. It's pretty cool, huh? For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know I started in 120 square foot shed that didn't even have power. We used to have to run electrical cords out of the garage just so we could run the tools. From there, we went to a 650 square foot facility, which you saw in my later YouTube videos, and then our previous shop, which we dedicated 1,000 square feet to the wood shop. Now, in our new 16,000 square foot facility, we've dedicated 2,500 square feet to the wood shop. I've been a diligent student of shop layout and design so that we can maximize our processes here. So I've created a free tool that's gonna be over on my website to help you lay out your shop before you ever have to move a tool. Today, we're gonna talk about how to lay out your shop so that it's ultra efficient and you can utilize whatever space you have, anything from 250 to 2,500 square feet. We're gonna talk about how to lay that out and why you would put certain tools where and what you need to be aware of when you're setting it up. So let's talk about what we've created. This is the free tool we've created over on camtools.com. It's a digital download, PDF, and it has every tool you could possibly want from a CNC to a lathe to miter station, 52-inch table saw, 36-inch table saw, 12-inch planer. And these are all to scale. These are actually wrong. We're gonna redo them. It'll look like this when you get it. And that scale is half an inch equals one foot, which looks like this. And this represents 500 square feet, which is about your two-car garage. A single-car garage, you can cut this paper in half, or if you have a weirdly-shaped shop, you can draw it. You can print out multiple pages of this. So like, for example, if you had a 1,000-square-foot shop, you could use two sheets. 1,500 square feet, you could use three, and so on. And if you have a strangely-shaped shop like mine, you can print out bigger than your shop and then draw it out with like a marker. This is where I got this idea, is we had drawn our shop and I was drawing where all the tools went, and we decided like, why don't we create this tool for other people to use? So it has every tool imaginable. You can print it out, cut your tools out, and lay them out as you go. So let's say this is your typical two-car garage. This is where you would enter, and you obviously want a table saw. What we've done is we've created in-feed and out-feed space that you need. So this is eight feet on either side. You may not need that much. You may want to put it much closer to your door because you know you can raise the door up. And then let's say you wanted an out-feed table. You know that you could slide that out-feed table right under there. If you knew that you had your sharpening station and you wanted to put it underneath your out-feed table and pull it up when you wanted, you could put your sharpening station right there. If you'd like to turn tools, you can put your lathe over here. If you know you're going to be jointing a bunch of boards and you want to put your jointer there, your planer right next to it so that you have room. And those two tools are right next to each other. You can then measure how much distance is going to be between those. Okay, do you have enough room to walk around? And as you can see, this is a great tool because you can say, okay, well that doesn't work. Let me move my table saw over and move my planer over or even move my planer right by my out-feed table. Keep my jointer against the wall because I have a 240-volt jointer and I know my electrical box is right here. You can add a router table, a drill press in the corner. And one of the great things about shop setup that is important to know is that if you make tools with similar out-feed capabilities, then they can be used to get right next to each other and overlap some. This actually goes this way because this red area is where you'd stand. You can put a workbench right here in the middle and you're like, okay, I know that I'm running out of room with these tools, what else is really important to me? Maybe it's a drum sander, but that's gonna go against the wall on a mobile base and you're gonna bring it out when you need it. Maybe you want a four-by-four CNC. Where are you gonna put that? What can we eliminate? Maybe it lives underneath your out-feed table while you're not using it and then it comes up when you are. If you want a lumber rack, you could put that against the wall over here. Regardless, this is how you use the tool and all these tools are available to you. You can cut them out, they'll fit. You can mark out your shop the exact size it is and use this tool to help yourself with layout. And what's really cool about it is then you can do take-offs on electrical and dust collection so you don't buy a bunch of extra really expensive PVC or wire, you can get the right amount of stuff. Now let's talk about shop setup. Let's talk about how we lay this out. Let me show you around how we've set up our shop, how I would do it in a small shop and what tools is really important to put together. First and foremost, when we talk about shop setup, you wanna remember that everyone's workflow is different. And so what I do may not be right for you. I think there's some key things in there that you wanna follow, but you're gonna wanna decide what is best for your situation. And that's why we've included so many tools in the sheet. In fact, there's a couple in there that I don't even have, if you can believe that. When I had my 120 square foot shop, I built some really big projects in there, but everything was on mobile bases and stuff had to get rolled out and put away. I called it shop Jenga. In fact, I remember there was one project where I had to feed boards in one door of the shed and then out the other door just so I could get it done. Everything was assembled outside. But what matters most is workflow. Like where is lumber coming into the shop and then what happens? So let's talk about that and where we're gonna keep our lumber and then what happens next. So when I think about workflow, you think about lumber entering your shop, right? And you need to decide, are you somebody who does more sheet goods? Like are you building cabinets or veneered plywood? Or are you working more with hardwoods? But either way, I like wood to acclimate to my shop for a couple of days when it comes in. So it comes in in the door over here. We're gonna store a lot of it here. We've got a rolling lumber cart in the back for sheet goods and then we'll build a rack for hardwood. But then after that, there's a pretty typical cluster in which your shop sort of uses. And that's table saw, jointer, planer, right? If you're doing mostly sheet goods, you may be able to get away with a track saw by your door and a couple of saw horses for getting it down to size. But at some point, you're gonna get to all these tools. When you're doing rough lumber, I may break it down into smaller components a little bit, but I'm almost always gonna go to the jointer and then to the planer. So in our shop, we have the cluster, which is jointer, planer, and then table saw. And that allows us to stay in the same area. I don't have to move and lift lumber onto all these things. We go jointer, planer, table saw. And a key component in this is we have so much electrical in this shop. It's on this wall here. And that allows me to power all these tools, which are either two-pole 240 or three-phase tools. It allows me to run electrical short distances. In fact, last week, we just had a video on how to install 240-volt outlets in your shop for these bigger tools, which are much more efficient and much more powerful. And as your shop grows, it's something I certainly would suggest you invest in. But then from here, this is where people's kind of workflows really start to diverge. Like, what do you like to do? Are you doing complex components that require templates? Are you assembling cabinets? Are you gluing up panels for big tabletops? Is CNC something you really like to do? And that's where different workflows start to diverge from the main cluster that everybody uses, and you need to pick what is best for you. So I have all those locations set up in my shop. Let me show you each of those stations, when I would use them, and why those tools are together. I feel like I like to do a lot of furniture projects that require templates. And that typically uses three types of tools, right? A bandsaw to remove a bunch of material so that you get down really, really close, so you can then flush trim on your router table. So we have two bandsaws here, one for resawing, one for cutting tight curves. We have two different blades on them. Definitely a luxury. I'm guessing a lot of you don't have two powerful bandsaws that can do multiple things, but having your bandsaw and your router table together is really important, along with sanders. If you're using spindle sanders to get into tight curves that maybe you can't remove material from with your bandsaw or you're sanding templates down to the right size after you've drawn them, this is going to be three types of tools that work great together. Now, if you're doing panels, you're gonna wanna assemble these panels. And so we have an assembly table over here, which is gonna have our clamp rack. And this table is perfectly flat. I built it so that this piece of MDF under here, now MDF's great because you can get glue on it and it just chips right off. We've shimmed it up so that it's perfectly flat. That's not ideal. I really wanna build a torsion box assembly table, which is definitely something we're gonna do here in this new shop. Apologize for the mess. We're prototyping some new tools. In fact, this Katz-Moses router plane's gonna be up for presale here in a couple of weeks. So keep an eye out for that. We're also gonna be having a BLEM stop block sale today. So all the BLEMs that are perfect condition functionally, but may have a scratch or a ding in them, they're gonna be on very deep discount over on our website. I'll link that down below. But I digress. So this is assembly, right? Assembly's gonna involve things like drilling holes for hardware or putting panels together. So we'll have our clamp rack up on the wall. These toolboxes will move. This is gonna be the area we keep all of our glues and epoxies and finishes over here. So for finishing, you're gonna wanna have that in your assembly area. But you wanna have all those things close together because nothing is scarier than when you're trying to glue something up in your shorter clamp and you gotta run across the shop, right? Like this is a mistake. So this is gonna be a dedicated area that's going to allow you to glue up maybe big panels or you're gluing up a box or something, but it's gonna be an area where you keep all those tools. But if you're not into templates and you just wanna cut fine jointer, you're cutting mortise and tenon, dovetails, you're gonna wanna work bench that has all of your hand tools close to it. So back here up on the wall, we have our, this is gonna be the backdrop of our new shop. We're gonna be building a cool sign. We're gonna be building this really cool French cleat system that will have templates for everybody that you can download for all of our tools. So we'll have this big French cleat wall back here. And that's gonna have all my hand tools. This is the Moxon vise, which if you've seen this video, this is one of our most popular sets of templates and plans that we sell. This is something I've used to cut joinery for my entire career. I love this thing. It's perfect size. I love the hold. I love that you can stick big boards all the way down so you can work on the end, but it's a great tool. This is another thing we have coming out. Gosh, I'm showing you guys all the secrets today. It's a weighted brass mallet that has removable brass heads that you can be replaced with plastic. So it's a non-marring. So if you need something where you gotta be real gentle and you don't wanna mar it and you're not just like banging on a chisel, you can trade out the plastic heads, which is super cool. This will be on pre-sale in like a month, month and a half maybe. And that's what we do here. And that's what we've built this business to do is be really efficient at developing and manufacturing products. So, you know, when we talk about shop layout, that's something I know a lot about, but I digress. This will be where all my hand tools are. We'll do all our joinery videos here. When we do assembly of like really small components, I may do it here on the Moxon vise, but it's really important for efficiency that when you need your marking gauge, you don't have to go walk somewhere else or you need your number four hand plane, you don't have to go walk somewhere else. You want that all really close to your workbench. We definitely have plans to build like a Rubo style workbench here. And when we do that, we're gonna want all those tools really, really close. So when it comes to assembling cabinets, a lot of times I'm not gonna be using any of those tools. I'm definitely not using a planer, maybe a jointer occasionally, but plywood and jointers don't really get along. So I'm gonna be ripping a bunch of pieces on my table. So they're all gonna come out on my huge outfit table here. This actually used to be Sean Boyd's. We have a dead flat. We can then stack those components up and start assembling those cabinets. Maybe using glue and brad nails, or you have rabbits, whatever. When you're doing cabinets, you're really only using your table saw. Other than that, I mean, that's like the basis of our shop, except for behind me, you see our sharpening area and 3D printers. 3D printers, eh, maybe not good for a dusty shop, but I'm not too worried about it. This is where we have water access. We lovingly have what we call the pit of despair, which the company that was in here before used to make cement products or cementuous-based building products. And they had this big drain over here where they would drain stuff. So we have water access. I can just dump it in the ground here and it goes out to the sewer. So that's where we have our sharpening station. And that's kind of the gist of the shop. What's really important to think about when you're setting up a shop is what is your workflow? What do you like to build? What's gonna be important to you? And then when you set that up, if you use the shop layout tool that we have for you over on our website, you can do takeoffs for dust collection. That's another thing to think about is dust collection is a lot easier if you can kind of run it in a circle or a line. So if you can set up your tools so that you have minimal amount of forks, that's gonna increase your airflow. It's gonna increase your dust collection efficiency, which is not only better for your overall happiness, but it's safer for your lungs. Electrical as well. You wanna make sure that you know where your electrical box is. If you have to run 25 feet across your shop for a 240 outlet, that's a lot of conduit, it's a lot of wire. That wire can get really expensive. And so, you know, maybe you wanna rearrange it so you're closer to your pimp. The other thing you wanna think about is what is your future plans? Maybe you don't have all the tools you want yet, but maybe you wanna clear a space for it. Or if you're running dust collection, maybe you create another outlet somewhere that's capped off and you don't use until you get that new tool you've been pining after. That's sort of the gist of shop operation. Head over to the website and check out those plans. Head over, grab yourself a Blem stop block. There's not a lot of them. So if there's some available, I'd grab that pretty quick. They go fast. Guys, thanks for watching. Head over to KM Tools website if you wanna support the channel. You can support the charity, the Katz-Moses Woodworkers with Disabilities Fund, or just get lots of great articles in our blog and sign up for our newsletter. As always, thanks for watching. Stay safe in the shop and have a wonderful day.