Tidying up my workspace

So having spent some time in someone else’s workshop I picked up some things about their setup which I liked, and decided to invest some time in making some improvements in my workshop.
The first thing I learned to like was having a tray beneath the lathe bed that I could put things down on, and which collects a large amount of the shavings, reducing the amount that hit the floor. Fortunately for me the platform that my father made for the lathe already has a metal cross that connects underneath the lathe bed which provides a surface that a platform can easily rest on. So it was really just a question of cutting a board to the right length.

As I was doing this an idea occurred to me, that it would be cool to have a ‘bin’ built into the surface, basically just a hole directly beneath the lathe’s main work area which holds a bin liner. To achieve this I made a simple gasket type arrangement, a hole cut into the board, and an MDF ring just larger than the hole. Then 2 small holes through the ring and the board, that take some bolts and wing nuts. This allows the ring to be tightened up against the board.

With this done a bin liner is fed between the board and the ring. Then the wing nuts are tightened to hold it in place. This lets me sweep sawdust straight into a bin, keeping the surface fairly clean for putting other things on.

The second thing was a wall mounted rack to hold all my chisels. My existing ‘solution’ had been to leave chisels laying around accept for a few which went down through some holes near the headstock. The problem being that it often took me a couple of guesses to pick up the right chisel.

Today I made a simple wall mount. a sheet of hardboard, for the back, and a couple of strips of MDF to make an enclosed section at the base. This is mounted on the wall above my lathe. The chisel handles stand up in the enclosed section, and I use panel pins to hold the tops of the chisels in place. This lets me have them all lined up in easy reach, and easy to see which one I need.