Dedicated Sharpening Station - Part 2

The top surface of my sharpening station will have three components: a laminated top on the left-hand side, a solid wood top on the right-hand side, and a tool tray that hangs between them in the center.  I decided to fabricate and attach the two work surfaces first, and then I can build the tool tray to exactly fit the space in-between.

My cabinet is low since it was originally intended to be the base of a workbench, so I needed to come up with a method to elevate the top to a comfortable working height.  I milled down some 2x4 scraps and created simple cleats that the work surface can rest on.  A few pocket screws were all I needed to lock the laminate top in place.  Both the cleats and the top are mounted flush with the back of the cabinet but overhang a bit on the front, which will make it more comfortable to work at while standing.  The top overhangs the end of the cabinet by a larger margin, so I can also sit down if I wish.  Yeah, I’m lazy.  The one mistake I made here was fabricating all six cleats at the same time.  I found out later that I won’t be able to get my wood top to the same thickness as the laminate top, so the two cleats on the right-hand side of the cabinet will need to be taller to compensate.  Once I know the final thickness of the wood top, I’ll remake those two cleats.

Speaking of the wood top, I also milled down my hodge-podge of construction lumber scraps and started the glue-up.  The wood top needs to be 27” wide.  To make the glue-up a little easier, I created three sub-assemblies.  Once they’re out of the clamps and cleaned up I’ll run them through my planer to bring them all to a consistent thickness, and then I can join them into the final piece.  In the picture here you can see that two are already in the clamps and the third is on the far left-hand side of the bench ready for glue.  I know what you’re thinking… and yes, cleaning up all that glue squeeze out really sucked.

Dedicated Sharpening Station - Part 1

I know, I know… I’m supposed to be working on a tool cabinet, right?  And I am, I promise.  This is a side project for me while I work through the planning phase of the tool cabinet, which will be the subject of another post.  It’s the perfect storm:  I have a workflow problem to solve and I’m itching to build something!

The Problem
I don’t sharpen my tools often enough.  I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve used a dull chisel or hand plane simply because it was too much of a hassle to sharpen it.  If I want to sharpen a plane iron or a chisel, here’s the process I  go through with my current “setup:”

1. Clear off a space on my table saw’s outfeed table.
2. Retrieve my waterstones from the drawer where they live.
3. Go upstairs and fill a container full of water.  Bring said container back into the basement without spilling it all over the floor.
4. Go get a mop and clean up all the water that spilled.
5. Go back upstairs and refill the container, and be more careful bringing it down the stairs this time.
6. Put my waterstones into the water and wait for them to soak.
7. Keep waiting… they aren’t ready yet….
8. Retrieve my honing jig, spray bottle, camellia oil, etc, from the drawer where they live.
9. Set up the honing jig.
10. Sharpen.
11. Since I went through all the hassle of setting this stuff up, sharpen all of the other tools, also.
12. Pack up and put away the waterstones and sharpening paraphernalia.
13. Carefully bring the container back upstairs and dump out the water.
14. Go get a mop and clean up all the water that spilled.
15. Wipe up the water and slurry that is now covering my outfeed table.
16. Head back to the workbench to pick up where I left off.
17. Notice that it’s now too late to continue working.  Put away the tools and close up shop for the night.

The Challenge
I plan to build a stand-alone sharpening station with a couple of hard requirements:

• Provide space to keep my waterstones soaking at all times.
• An easy-to-clean work surface that won’t be damaged by water.
• Provide storage to keep my sharpening implements close at hand and ready-to-go.
• Provide space to permanently mount a small metal-working vise.
• Provide space to keep a grinder set up (which I don’t currently own… future purchase).
• Provide space to mount a saw vise (which I also don’t currently own… future purchase).
• This entire workstation needs to be constructed out of materials that are already laying around my shop.

The Raw Materials

You’re going to think I’m cheating when you see this first item and you might be right, but it’s something that’s laying around my shop right now with no meaningful purpose.  Back in 2003 I saw the plan for this cabinet in a magazine as part of a “dream workbench.”  It seemed like a fantastic idea at the time, so I built the base cabinet, but once I had it together I never bothered to make a top because I knew that it wouldn’t work for me as a workbench.  Ever since then, I’ve been pushing this monster around my shop.  I have to be honest, since I built it so early in my woodworking life, the workmanship on this cabinet is questionable, but it weighs a ton and it’s fairly bomb-proof.  I used it as a miter saw stand for many years.  Unfortunately, I burned out the motor in the miter saw recently and decided to not replace it, so this cabinet now needs a new purpose in life.

The eagle-eyed reader will recognize this next item: it’s an extension table for a Delta Unisaw.  I actually have two of these suckers kicking around the shop.  I bought my Unisaw back in 2006, and when I checked the extension table with a straightedge I found that it was dished in the center.  I called Delta and they were kind enough to send me out another one, no questions asked.  Unfortunately, the new extension table was also dished in the exact same manner.  At that point, I just gave up and built my own, which I’m still using today.  Oddly, when I check these tables with my precision straightedge now they seem more than flat enough.  Maybe my standards have changed.  What I do know is that this table is covered in a laminate that is easy to clean and nearly indestructible, which makes it an excellent candidate for a sharpening station.

One extension table is not enough to cover the entire cabinet.  It covers approximately half the length of my base cabinet, so I need to fill in the other half with another material.  This sounds like the perfect place to use up some of my scrap construction lumber.  I plan to laminate a small wood top that will give me space to mount a small metal-working vise and a saw vise on the end.  Some of these boards have been in my shop for 12 or more years and are actually already glued together (poorly) because I had used them to practice jointing a glue surface with a hand plane all those years ago.

Finally, I present to you a 3/4” S4S mahogany board.  I’ve had this board for so long that the details regarding where and why I procured it are lost to the mists of time.  It’s not particularly attractive and it will be closer to 5/8” thick by the time I get it flat, but it should work well for constructing a tray to hold all of my sharpening implements and tools.

That’s it!  These are the pieces that I’ll be using to assemble a dedicated sharpening station for my shop.  In my next post on this project, I’ll show you how I plan to mount the table surfaces to the cabinet.

A Move to the Middle

I was driving behind a truck when it kicked up a rock and chipped my windshield.  I should’ve had that chip repaired right away, but life got in the way.  Winter came, and that chip became a small crack, then a larger crack, and soon I had a crack that spread from one side of my windshield to the other.  This happened five or six years ago, and yes, that crack is still in my windshield.  Honestly, I don’t even see it anymore; my eyes just naturally look past it when I’m driving.  It’s amazing how, given enough time, we can develop workarounds that allow us to live with easily remedied annoyances.

Up until a few months ago, I was a workbench-against-the-wall guy.  My shop is long and narrow, so placing the bench against the wall gives me the space I need to move around.  The wall also offers some extra support to the bench when I’m using a hand plane.  I learned to tolerate the disadvantages of this setup just like the cracked windshield in my car.  I can only work comfortably on one side of my bench when it’s against the wall.  Any operation that requires access from the ends or the other side has to be done elsewhere.  Clamping a workpiece to the front edge of the bench is always inconvenient because I have to pull the bench away from the wall a bit.  My concrete basement floor is not level, so pulling my bench out a few inches disturbs the shims under the back left leg of the bench, which then makes it wobble.  And don’t even get me started on the kind of damage a 50” parallel jaw clamp can do when it tips over and hits the tool rack hanging on the wall.

When it came time to smooth the top of the curved-front desk, I pulled the bench into the center of my shop to make it easier to plane the entire panel… and it’s still there today.  Having 360 degree access to a workpiece was life-changing.  Nothing was in my way, I didn’t have to worry about knocking something off the wall while reaching across the workpiece, and lo-and-behold the concrete floor is actually flat in the center of my shop, eliminating the need for shims.  I have no plans to ever move the bench back against the wall.  It seems that moving out of my comfort zone made me realize how uncomfortable I’d been all along.