Articles regularly appear in the woodworking periodicals about the essential power tool in your shop. The authors make convincing arguments for their choices, too. I prefer to think in terms of what suite of crucial tools makes your work possible? Your answer will vary with the materials you work with, how you change them, and the product you produce.
I’ll use my work as an example. In my work carving portraits of boats and ships, I need to resaw thick stock into thinner frequently. I then need to plane stock to the final thickness. My indispensable power tools are my bandsaw and my planer. I also have a small power jointer, but I have a shooting board and an old jointer plane that work as well. The shop is too small for the sort of jointer that you might find in a boat shop or cabinetmakers. As a result, the blades on the hand plane are sharp, and the sole is polished for when the little 6-inch power jointer won’t do. Without the jointers, I wouldn’t be able to glue up the panels I need for portraits. This suite of tools speeds my work. Could I do without them? Yes. There was a time before I could afford these aids, and I used small portable and manual tools to complete the tasks just like my 18th and 19th-century antecedents. I am thrilled that I no longer have to do that.
If I was a cabinetmaker, my bandsaw might gather dust because the star of my tool suite could be the table saw. But, as you see from the picture, my table saw serves as a place to stack recently resawed boards for a series of mast hoop portraits of small sailing craft. Likewise, my router table serves as a place to stack small logs before I resaw them; it’s a power tool that sees heavy use in many woodworking shops.
Most of us have limited space and limited funds to spend on tools. You must think in terms of space available and which tools are critical to your work. That large console table saw with digital readout to ten decimal points might have you drooling and daydreaming. But putting together a suite of tools that gets the job done is a better use of resources.
My primary goal is to get the wood to my carving bench with the minimum work, cost, and effort. Not till then do I start the most enjoyable aspects of my work. So think about that as you plan tool purchases.
When my husband Bob ran out of space for a new tool, he just built a new addition onto a studio or a new studio entirely. After 14 years, we had 7 art studios attached to our house. Excessive? Not in Bob’s eyes. After his death, it took me four years to sell off all the tools and, finally, the house.
There should be a 12 step program available for us. I just took delivery of a new laser engraver/cutter and the new bandsaw is coming soon. But…I only have two shops. Is it true that he who dies with the most tools wins?
In our case it was “He with the most tools dies.” But he was so happy for his last 15 years when his wife let him make and buy all the tools and studios and additions that he wanted to! Actually, I profited by it as he made sure I had every tool I needed and even built a few of them himself. Every appliance that broke down became a new tool. I think I wrote a post about this once. And he loved to repurpose and repair old tools found in flea markets and even made our diamond drill out of an old missile tracker from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories! You two would have hit it off, Lou.
You’re right. The sort of person I’d definitely associate with.