There has been some progress in getting my temporary shop set up, but at a very slow pace. In that time, Rennie has completed several major projects, Glenn has built or rebuilt many shop fixtures and Allen has built an entire fire engine. At my pace, I think the French will complete the renovation on Notre Dame before I get my shop set up the way I want.
When I consider all the above accomplishments, it makes me question posting about this small project, but here goes. This post is about building a simple wall behind my bench to hang tools. The exercise was an eye opener in how frustrating it is to work in such a small space, especially when the lumber you are handling becomes larger. I am seeing that building anything larger than a small box will be a challenge. The biggest challenge is cutting down lumber into accurate dimensions. Without a table saw I am relying on a track saw. This still takes space and it also requires something more than I currently have to do this accurately and just as importantly with some speed. I am still thinking about the options I have here.
I got pine from Home Depot about 2 months ago and it had been sitting in my "shop". I hand picked through what was there and was able to get fairly decent boards but they still had some cup to them and some bow. But it was all very minor and I was not going to down the rabbit hole of correcting any of it. My strategy was to tongue and groove the boards together to take out the worst of the defects I couldn't cut out when sizing the final dimensions.
First I laid all the boards down in my shop annex #1, better know as the hallway for the bedrooms, to get an idea of the best layout for appearance.
I then hand planed one edge on each board and then using that reference edge used a track saw to rip and crosscut to my final dimensions. I ripped the boards so that they would fit the space I wanted and would all have the same "face" size after tongue and grooving them. The single board without the tongue was ripped smaller than the other three.
I must admit, it was after trying to rip and crosscut in a very small space (shop annex #2, AKA the mechanical room), that I considered that maybe another hobby would be best. The one good thing about a lot of time lapsing between when I could work on this, I forgot how painful it was and kept coming back to it.
With everything dimensioned, now came the fun part.
I only had two studs in the area that this was going to sit. The exterior wall studs are built on 2' centers. I had cut left over pine to mount directly to the drywall and studs and all the planks are mounted to them. The strategy I used in screwing the planks to the wall was a single screw at the bottom of each plank. The screw at the bottom of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th plank (1st being the bottom plank) pulls the board below it tight to the wall via the tongue and groove joint. (see the photo below). The only exception of the single screw in each plank was the top plank. I needed a screw at the top to keep it from loose at the top. I elongated a hole for this screw to allow for movement. All the tongue and groove joints were assembled tight as I am betting on further shrinkage of the boards and not expansion. If not, no great loss, but time will tell.
All that is left is to build fixtures for hanging the tools.