Keeping your tools out of harm's way
The continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted all of us in different ways. In my case, quite apart from having to self isolate as a golden oldie and thus unable to nip out for hardware, my hardwood timber supplier was shut, cutting off essential supplies of the ash and sycamore I use for stock items such as chopping boards. Needless to say, workshop projects ground to a standstill fairly early on.
So for many, like me, this proved to be a good time to look around the workshop and ask whether the best use is being made of wall and ceiling space in relation to keeping tools safe from damage and, equally important, readily to hand. A job that can be accomplished using offcuts, perhaps, and requiring only screws from stock.
My first workshop, located in my parents’ Victorian home and a 10th birthday present from my father who’d spotted my early love of woodworking, consisted of a bench in a housemaid’s cupboard. Over the years, I’ve now experienced working from several rather larger premises, including the spacious outbuilding where I set up a joinery business in the 1970s. Now retired, I operate a charity-funding craft business from a large garage adjoining my home, and in this smaller space I’ve found room for all the tools and machinery required for the running of a commercial business.
A common factor throughout has been my strong belief that expensive tools, regarded as the lifeblood of carpentry, should be cherished and treated with the utmost respect. For instance, beautifully crafted tools made by the likes of Marples, Moore and Wright and Veritas should never be kept loose in a drawer where they’ll jostle together, metal against metal; nor should they be lazily racked to hang between, or dangle from, partially-driven screws, where the same metal-to-metal contact applies; or worse still – wood chafed by a screw thread. As the photos in this article show, hundreds of tools and their accessories live in my workshop, housed in wooden racks, all made according to these rules.
Rules for wooden tool racks
1. All tools must be within arm’s reach of my position at the bench, racked in such a way as to be easily brought into play and then, even more importantly, returned to the same rack so as not to clutter the bench. This is especially true if, like me, your skill as a woodworker is matched only by chronic untidiness and a tendency to just dump a tool on the bench before picking up the next one required.
2. The racks are designed so that the tool is held securely, and to reveal, at a glance, when an item is missing. Thus, any tool in danger of being swept away with the shavings can be quickly identified and hunted down. While no two workshops are identical, or even alike, I hope these photos and descriptions of various racks that have served me well, may, between them, plant an idea for helping you to keep your tools readily to hand, as well as prolonging their life.
As a postscript, let me add that I share with my fellow Welshmen a shortness of stature, and anybody taller than 5ft 8in risks bumping their head when entering or leaving the workshop – it’s my space after all! If as a result of anything you’ve seen and read here going on to create a similar hazard, my advice is to warn any visitors.
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