A few weeks after my thirteen year old grandson finished building his woodworkers workbench (see Part 1 of this series) with minimal help from grandpa, he was anxious to get started on his next shop project. (I will confess that his father and I made the initial investment in the power tools and hand tools that I listed in the first part of this series but he’s an industrious young fellow and works after school to buy the things that he wants.) The area of the basement that he was given for a shop was small, about 14X20 feet, so he was going to be using mostly bench top power tool as I said earlier. Skill make a fine line of bench top power tools that are perfect for the small shop and I will introduce you to the complete line in a moment but first I want to touch on a problem faced by every woodworker who has a small shop-storage space. There never seems to be enough of it so for my grandson’s second project we decided to build a mobile tool storage center and workstation. Once again I’m not going to reinvent the wheel by giving instructions on how to build one here, here the plans and instructions on how to do it in pdf format. This was the ideal second project for my grandson because he already had all the power tools needed to build it. All he needed to purchase was the materials to build it with. Actually I was having so much fun seeing him learn new skills that I ended up buying the materials for him. Besides being a mobile tool storage center and tool work station this cabinet doubles as a 4 Foot X 4 Foot assembly table when the drop leaf is installed and he would need an assembly table when he started future projects.
Skill has just come out with their bench top tool series and those tools, the bench top drill press, bench top scroll saw, bench top grinder, bench top belt/disc sander and the bench top band saw, miter saw, etc all offer you all the advantages of their full size brothers at a fraction of the cost. Bench top tools also allow you to store them under the bench or some other out of the way place when not in use which saves a great deal of floor space in a cramped shop. You are also getting a quality power tool at a fraction of the cost of a floor mounted one.
Some people don’t like bench top power tools because they have a tendency to move around as they are being used but that’s an easy problem to overcome. Mount each power tool to a large square of ¾” plywood with enough plywood extending out behind the tool to allow you to clamp it down firmly to the mobile work station. The permanently attached wood bases also allows each bench top tool to slide into a storage cabinet on rails affixed at the proper height and spacing for each tool. When I built the rack in my shop I designed it with the space for the drill press being the first space nearest the floor since the drill press was the heaviest tool and required the biggest space.
