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mohawk finishing products i've been using mohawk finishing products for more than 30 years
from sandpaper to fill sticks mohawk has all your finishing needs hey everyone and welcome back to
the shop well we've got a pretty rainy soggy fall day here and if you can hear that sound that's
the rain bouncing off the metal roof of the shed as you can see i've started another project in the
barn and i'm kind of in this mode of wrapping all the loose ends up of these projects and getting
the shop as efficient and organized as i possibly can and with that in mind i visited my friends
over at green street joinery earlier this week and went on a shop tour it's given
me some great ideas of how i want to reorganize the workflow of my shop and i hope
it does the same for you hi guys this is rich this is jeff this is rob we're here from
greece street joinery that's our company and we're here to give you a tour of the shop
and i'm going to let jeff take care of that so see you later all right so we're here at
support monmouth new jersey where a uh design build shop so we build uh custom furniture
and cabinetry we do all the design and uh everything here ourselves so when uh material
comes in it gets stored here in our woodshed see we have a lot of different lumber some eight
quarter cherry plywood or quartered oak maple some more plywood and stuff so once the
wood comes in it gets stored here and then when we're ready to use it comes into the shop
typically the first thing we'll do is we'll uh we'll break down the rough lumber here at the chop
saw uh this is a 12-inch hitachi that we actually got from a friend we had a dewalt for a long
time but it uh it finally gave up the ghost we got this it's working really well for us you
can see we have dust collection on all the tools so we try and keep the dust to a minimum
try and keep the blast gates accessible so after things are broken down
rough we come here to the jointer this is an oliver 4240 that we actually upgraded
with a shelix spiral cutter head so you can see here it's a series of small carbide cutters
much quieter much cleaner than straight blades so what we do is we'll face joint our boards
and then they come over here to the planer this is a your craft 20 inch you've probably
seen a lot of different planters that look just like this so the grizzly the shop fox and
uh the jet are all basically identical to this it's uh called a standard four post planer so
this is a 20 inch with a luxe cut spiral cutter head super quiet leaves a great finish so after we
plane we head back to the jointer to joint edges and then we come here to the saw stop so this is
our three horsepower industrial cabinet saw this is probably our newest tool it's uh probably
our favorite tool very quiet very safe strong we do a lot of ripping of
hardwood so you need to have a strong saw we have this cross-cut sled or cross-cut fence
rather so we're able to cross cut about 39 inches and you know as wide as we can fit over here so we
use this to cut all of our door material to size we cross cut plywood here has a 52 inch
fence so we can get nice wide wide pieces we have another table saw here this
is a three horsepower delta unison on this we run a dedicated dado blade so this is a ridge carbide super dado master goes
up to about an inch uh from a quarter inch to an inch we build all of our doors on the dado saw so
it's very important that we have a good saw and a good blade some peripheral tools we have a 38 inch
double drum sander back here this is a wood master made in the united states great tool a little
finicky but it works well for bringing things to a consistent thickness so it has
two drums we have 100 and 120 grit i have my bench back here keep our
hand tools at our individual benches i'm happy to be right next to our clamp collection
a lot of bessies a lot of 24s 30s a couple jorgensen's mixed in and some bigger bessies over
there a little bit of extra wood storage we like to bring things in and season them let them
come to the right humidity before we use them we have a condition shop so it's air-conditioned
in the summer and it's heated in the winter that way you know things aren't moving when they
get into someone's home over on this side we have rich's bench right here and our drill press
drill press doesn't get a whole lot of use but it's great for drilling nice straight
holes and you know finished pieces and cutting plugs things like that over on this
side we have rob's bench right here nice big heavy bench probably my favorite bench
in the shop grizzly bandsaw here 17 inch we use this for resawing cutting curves a lot
of jig making goes on here stuff like that and this is really where everything starts
initially we do uh all our design on sketchup and on fusion 360.
So we spend a lot of time on
the computer not necessarily drawing here a lot we pull up our drawings on the tv here straight
from the computer we can work for them right there but we uh we're mac guys here so we draw
on our macs and that's what we built from so well it's a beautiful shop what is the size this
shop is just under 900 square feet so the outside dimensions of the building are 24 by 36 so we're
coming in around 890 square feet i believe i think that's a great size 24 by 36 yeah yeah so this is
actually an amish pole barn so the sides were put up it was run with furring on the inside sheetrock
and then the slab was poured so we actually have dust collection underneath of this table that
comes up here and goes to our dust collector which is actually in a separate room in the back
which is really nice so a little forethought there running the the ductwork before the slab
was put down right so this building was built with a shop in mind yes exactly yeah we
have 220 electric coming up here in the center um really a lot better than having everything
come from the ceiling absolutely with my shop i can go into the floor because it's on two by
six joists and that's what i'm going to have to do soon so your saw stop is connected to 220 yes
yeah so this is a as most cabinet saws are 220 um you know this is the three horsepower we went
originally the delta was our main table saw we had a five horsepower unison that was our dado
saw that was a three-phase saw that we had on a phase converter so the phase converter started to
go and rather than invest in a new one which is you know upwards of the price of a new table saw
we decided to swap and put a new saw stop here so other than the safety feature why did you go with
sawstop safety feature was definitely the top top reason but this sliding table was definitely at
the top of our list we wanted something where we could cross cut easily you know typically we would
use something like this this is uh from rockler made by jessum up in canada so this is the
rockler miter xl this is what we used to cross-cut everything with what a difference
so going from this to a ball-bearing table like this is a huge upgrade i
mean this thing slides so smooth you can see it's full of dust and it's still that's really nice i don't have the
space for that that's the only thing they have an even larger one that
we we would have loved to get because you can um you can do i think
almost a full four by eight piece of plywood with that one but you know it would have come out
too far we're in a constant battle of what we can fit comfortably in the shop because you can
see here we have we have our sanding cart here and this is the cart with our finishing
material in it once you get some cabinets in here the space is you know it really gets
a lot smaller so we're in a constant battle of paring down what we do have and trying to choose
what's going to serve us best sort of in this space and i know from your instagram this is a
new build you want to show it to me open up the drawers this is uh we have a fine turbo two in
here which is our our main sander for our main vacuum for sanding so in here we have uh all of
our just sandpaper we like the merca novastar it's nice it's uh it's actually like a plastic
backing so it's way less prone to ripping actually mirka makes all the sandpaper for festool which
is we use uh some festool sandpaper as well we have our hand sandpaper here big
drawer for not so much uh stuff but and some other odds and ends here
little sanding guards vacuum bags stuff like that i have my little saloon doors i
like that that's a nice touch pull the vac out but if you're sanding it won't you know cause
we've had the vacuum get pulled out and sure originally the cabinet before was all closed up
and we had a fan so on this one i decided to just keep the whole side open so that the fan can get
or the vacuum can get some good ventilation on the back here we actually have oh nice some of
the sanders we have the six inch rotex here uh two pro five ltds and one ets 125 eq we um we
had some others that that actually finally died after about 20 years so we're looking to invest in
maybe maybe one or two more uh it's good to have a lot of sanders because some days all three
of us are sanding for almost an entire day so absolutely that's part of woodworking for sure
then we have two of these new festool ct-15s these are like our bench vacuums so these
are good for running the festool domino sander any sort of that thing that you're doing at
your own bench so they're small they're portable we have two of these we just talked about uh well
you just talked about sanders and the domino let's talk about some tools that aren't the bigger tools
like the sander and the table saw and see what what you would think would be sort of your go-to
tools to get a project on they don't have to be in that order but you kind of know what i'm talking
about yeah yeah i mean first thing i think of this this comes out on every single job
so this is a lee nielsen i'm not sure what they're calling this it's not the block plane
but it's sort of like a pocket plane just a small sort of inch and a half blade for breaking
edges cleaning up edges this is great when we're building doors i pull this out a lot
this is the medium shoulder plane from lee nielsen so we tend to leave the fit a little bit tight
on the tenons of our doors that way we can fine-tune them with a shoulder plane what
does the small lee nelson plane go for around i think it's about 125 dollars i want to say
it's funny because it is a small plane and i reach for my little stanley block plane
all the time but this does have a nice feel it's kind of got a special quality to it yeah and
the bronze it just you know looks so so nice you just like using it yeah i mean it's a you have to
you have to enjoy your tools and enjoy what you do so if you enjoy it a little bit more you're gonna
put put out a better product so sure i tend to invest my money you know in tools that i like
and if if it's something i need well i'll spend the money up front to get something that's good
and something that'll serve me for a long time so i've noticed that most of your cordless tools
are bosch yeah we run the bosch 12 volt here for our drills so we keep at our bench
we each keep a drill and a driver fuller bits and snappy bit holders that's
what i like i keep under here a 18 volt makita this is for you know larger bits
uh if you need to drill with a hole saw not at the drill press this is good and
this actually the frankenstein ryobi with makita battery hot glue is nice we use it
to attach drawer heads you know that way we can shim the drawer head we'll hot glue it on and
then come back with screws record this hot glue gun that sounds like something i need yeah and
for 30 bucks the ryobi is um pretty good yeah we also have a makita track saw here it's the
dual 18 volt track saw we use this a lot for installs first of all and for plywood so if we
because we only have a 39 inch cross cut cross cut capacity on the saw sometimes we'll break
down sheet goods before they make it into the shop just to make it a little a little more manageable
you like the makita better than the festool so i had the festool ts55 which is the corded
the corded festival track saw and i actually traded it for this i much prefer this saw a
because it's cordless and it actually has a lot more power believe it or not something i
read was cordless um because it's dc i believe can give more power than a than a corded tool
i'm not sure if that's the truth but what was the price on that it's about a 500 with the track
yes that's not bad yeah so we have a 55 inch track in here and we have a 110 inch track outside so
we can make a nice straight rip on the plywood bring it in and we have a nice straight edge you
want to show me what you're working on now yeah so here's a sapele barn door then we have all
dry fit we're waiting on some confirmation measurements before we we're actually going
to paint this is getting painted black benjamin moore advanced matte black
so before we assemble this we'll paint all these pieces because these are actually
tongue and groove so these pieces have a groove on the bottom and a tongue on the top so
these are all fit together and they fit into a a tongue groove here on the side or a mortise
and tenon you'll call it for a door so that you can see the door construction here all the
joinery on this was cut on the the dado blade typically we keep a 3 8 in there uh because that's
we cut a 3 8 dado for our backs and cabinets we use three ace backs but right now i think we have
a half inch on there i use that to cut the groove in these these are three quarters of an inch
this is a inch and a half inch and three eighths so the question that's going to come up is
since this is being painted why simply uh the client on this job was looking for some grain
to show through the paint um we went with sapili you know most we we gave her a couple samples we
did a walnut sample and we did a sapele sample she wasn't a big fan of the cathedraling
in the walnut so we went with this quarter sawn sapili which is super straight but it
has all these little you know open grain areas so you'll have some
nice nice texture to the wood so yeah thanks for checking out the shop you can
find us on instagram youtube facebook at green street joinery we shoot a podcast back here
at my bench every wednesday so you can find that on spotify stitcher apple podcasts and you
know any podcast app that you like it's called the american craftsman podcast so yeah check
us out i really enjoyed meeting the guys and getting a good look at their shop and it gave me
some really good ideas for my shop but i hope i gave you some for yours one thing that stands out
is the face to face table saws i just like that idea of having one saw set up with a designated
dado blade and then the main saw being a saw stop which makes a lot of sense because of
the safety features if you're wondering what i'm doing here i'll be talking about that
next week i had to build a temporary wall because i have to replace the sill plate or the
soleplate in the south side of the barn wall and one other thing i wanted to mention is
definitely check out green street joinery's instagram their youtube channel and their podcast
their podcast is a lot of fun i really enjoy it it's basically three woodworkers just
shooting the breeze talking about tools one of my favorite parts is their gripe of the
week so that could be a tool that could be a finish whatever i just find it funny to hear
the the three guys kind of go back and forth about real things so very authentic very real
i think you'll enjoy it click on the link in the description and check it out as always
thanks for tuning in and i'll see you next time before you start your next project
click on the link in the description for my professional woodworking plans and build a
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