Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’m loving the outfeed/assembly table that i built a while back. I don’t take great care to keep it nice. It’s a work surface. When it gets too bad to use, I can just screw off the top piece, flip it over and screw it back down. That being said, there are some really messy activities where I do still put down paper.

We have a 4 foot long roll of brown paper that gets used both in the shop and for Elijah’s craft projects. It doesn’t have a good home so it usually ends up in a corner of the house or in a closet. I’ve seen various YouTube woodworkers mount it to their assembly table. Tim was over at the house for an afternoon so we decided to give this project a shot.

We made a quick run to Home Depot for some 1/2″ threaded rod. That’s what supports the heavy roll. The interior hole is only about 3/4″ so I needed something thin and strong. We cut out a couple holders for the rod just using some scrap 3/4″ plywood. Those got screwed onto the sides of the table and the project was done! It’s one of those projects where I think “Why didn’t I do that months ago?”

We removed a couple small cherry trees along our driveway that were dying off. I saved some of the chunks of the bigger trunk in hopes that I could get a couple usable boards out of it. It will be way more work than just buying cherry boards, but it would be kind of neat to have something from a tree that grew in our yard. I watch lots of home milling on YouTube (especially Matt Cremona) but those are almost always bigger trees. I don’t really know how it translates to these smaller logs and I didn’t take the time to do a ton of research.

The logs were just a tad bit too tall for my bandsaw to handle so we sliced them up a bit with the chainsaw. Then I ran them through the bandsaw making ~2″ slabs. Those boards are now sitting in my shed with spacers between each one to allow for airflow. The goal is to get them to dry out as evenly as possible to avoid massive warping or cracking. I could have left them as a full log, but that generally leads to some pretty big cracks as the stresses in the wood are relieved. I don’t really know which way would work better, but a large part of this project is just about learning for myself.

I won’t know for quite a while (a year or two?) how well this worked. I have a moisture meter and it says the wood is at 36% right now. Professionally dried wood that has acclimated to my shop is closer to 10%. Once it’s dry enough, I’ll use my tools to mill them into nice square/flat boards and take out any of the warping that occurred while drying.

When I push wood off the end of my table saw, it just falls over the end, or if I’m not too lazy, I get out my new roller stands to catch the wood. It’s not the safest setup. I also lack a nice big area to build stuff so I end up building on the floor a lot. It was time for a change.

Enter the dual purpose outfeed/assembly table. I built it all out of a couple sheets of 3/4″ plywood. It’s about 1/8″ lower than my table saw to easily catch wood without getting caught up. I routed some channels into it that align with the miter slots on the table saw so that jigs and such have a place to go as I push them through the saw.

It’s also a great place to assemble projects. It’s on nice caster wheels so I can pull it out if needed or even roll it outside to use as a painting surface. The top is two layers of plywood. The top is meant to be unscrewed and flipped over or replaced every once in a while as it gets cut up or if it gets wet and the plywood delaminates.

The only additional thing I have in mind for it right now is a dispenser for a big roll of brown paper. It would go right along one of the side rails and easily pull across the table. I don’t need to keep the table pristine, but sometimes it’s nice to have easy cleanup.

It’s pretty big (4×4) partially because that was a convenient size to use up the plywood, but also because I’m hoping to buy a CNC machine next year. The one I have my eye on is about 1 meter by 1 meter. I think I’ll be able to fit it on the bottom shelf of this table and pull it out when I use it (or just use it down there if I don’t have a bunch of monkeying around to do.)

I’ve really been pounding out these bigger projects. They were queued up waiting for me to get a truck so that it was easier to buy plywood. I’ve just about burned through that list and now it’s time to get to some smaller projects again.

One side effect of buying the truck is that we now have more room in the garage. The truck doesn’t even come close to fitting in the garage (too wide, too long and maybe too tall.) I quickly took advantage of this to get more storage room and more shop room. Here’s what it used to look like when I had one bay combined for storage, toys and the shop.

The first step was moving the main storage shelves across to the other wall. It was pretty easy except I had to re-cut the bottoms of the posts because the floor slopes out to the garage doors and I was effectively reversing the shelves. Those shelves were one of the first projects that I did in the house. I built them using little more than a circular saw and a drill. You can get a long way with those two tools!

That gave me about 2 or 3 more feet along the wall in the third bay. I was able to convert that area into a pure shop area. All toys and storage happen on the other side of the garage. It will take a while to figure out how I want to arrange everything, but I think I’ll have the table saw near the garage door. That will allow me to easily open up the garage door and feed in extra long boards as needed. The bandsaw fits nicely to the right of the table saw. I can overlap/combine the “dead” areas of both tools.

The next thing I’m going to build is a small cabinet for my router table and then I’m going to build a combination assembly/outfeed table. I’m thinking it will be about 4 feet square. It will be a nice place to work on projects and will also give me a nice place to slide wood onto after finishing cuts on the table saw. After that I will probably fill up the blank wall with cabinets.

It’s so exciting to have an area I can really devote to a shop instead of stepping over and around boxes and toys! Below are photos of the current state. It will look a lot nicer in the near future.