 Down Home Alabama Workshop Tour. Well, I would work here as Paul Kruster here, a small workshop guy. I'm in Northern California, but today we're gonna drop in somehow magically, mystically through all sorts of electronics, and we're gonna do a workshop tour in Fairhope, Alabama for a guy named Brandon Fisher. Brandon has a beautiful workshop, and I think you're gonna be excited to see it. Just a little warning, some of you might get just a little bit jealous of Brandon, I know I did, so, oh man, did I ever. But that's all right, jealousy can be a healthy emotion sometimes, usually it's not, but sometimes it is. So let's switch to Fairhope, Alabama and connect with Brandon Fisher. Hey, Brandon, how are you doing? Good, how are you today? So folks, Brandon Fisher, Fairhope, Alabama, where is Fairhope? We are on Mobile Bay down near the Gulf, south of I-10 in the bottom corner of Alabama. Okay, bottom corner. South, east corner, south, west corner. So there's two counties, Alabama's got a little boot heel, kind of six down and separates Mobile Bay, and then the rest of Alabama's above the Panhandle of Florida. So we're down in that little part, south of I-10, about 20 minutes from Mobile. You would think the old workshop guy would know more about it, since he lived in Birmingham, but that was at age two, and now being 79, I've kind of forgotten what it looked like. So I'll look it up on a map. It looks different anyway. All right, well, let's get a little start here. So you've got a wood shop here, and I see you like Interstate 10, so you got that back on your wall there. That was a birthday present from everybody of mine, so. All right, and what size is your wood shop? It is 16 by 28. All right, so for most of us in the small workshop woodworking community, that would be pretty large, but we'll forgive you and we'll go from there. What would you, now, you're not a full-time woodworker. You do this as a hobby. Yeah, this is a hobby. All right, and your regular occupation is what? Farming, technically, but I also work at a brewery, and I used to do theater. Used to be a theatrical rigger, as well as building sets and doing lights and all that. Oh, so you've got some heavy construction in your blood. Yeah, yeah, I've been building stuff since high school, basically. All right, cool. Did a grandfather or father, did somebody lead you this direction as a hobby? Both, both my grandparents were woodworkers and tinkers. My mother's father was, his family had a hardware store and were blacksmiths before that. And then my dad was a farmer and grew up on a farm, and my grandfather had a workshop and did my dad, and still does. Well, when you have a farm, you gotta learn how to fix a lot of things, right? Yeah, I didn't grow up on a farm, so. This is the wife's family that I'm in the farming business with now, so. Okay, all right. Family business, that sounded like a dangerous proposition, but we won't go down that road. My company got taken over by my two sons and they got me out of there pretty quickly after that. No, they can go. Much to my pleasure, believe me, after 40-some years of running one company. All right, so, why don't you switch your camera to your back camera and then start us with what you would say is the highlight of your wood shop. All right. And we'll let you just kind of go around and do a tour. All right, it's the most boring shot. Just so you know, all right. Oh, hey. That's probably the highlight. Oh my God. 19 foot long miter station runs almost the whole length of that wall. Oh my God. So every one of those is a cabinet storing something? Yeah, so the top is cabinets and the bottom is drawers. There's 30 drawers all along there. Wow. Let me have a little more close up of the face there, the face of the bottom. Oh, beautiful grain. Yeah, so, and they've got these aluminum extrusion poles on them. All right, cool. All right, you mean you didn't do hand cut dovetails for all those drawers? I did not. This is top furniture and I just slapped it all together. All right. Holy mackerel, somebody who's practical. And I love the bird's eye up on the top. Yeah, it's all Baltic birch, all grain matched all the way across. So the face, other than that little part around the miter saw, the face is all grain matched across there. So that was quite an endeavor. I only had one shot at it. Yeah, right. Yeah, you gotta cut it right the first time. Otherwise you're in trouble. So you had several sheets of four by eight Baltic birch that you liked and you worked hard to figure out how to cut the components out of those sheets. That's right. That's exactly right, yeah. How many hours, how many days, how many weeks, how many months, how long did that puppy take you? I wanna say it took me about two weeks to get most of it done. The main carcass was there pretty fast and then all the drawers took quite a lot longer and a lot more wood than I expected. Yeah, isn't that amazing how you think you're gonna build a little project and then when you get all the wood and you cut up all the parts and you look at it and say, holy mackerel, that takes a lot of stuff. Yeah, this ended up being 26 sheets of plywood. Wow, wow. Fortunately at prior prices, not at today's prices, huh? Yeah, I built this last summer. So when I say today's prices, I'm talking about post-pandemic 2021 where apparently lumber's in scarce supply. So that's beautiful, okay? And tell me about the miter saw. Yeah, it's a Bosch, whatever they call it, the glider or whatever. It's got the articulating arms. And I built this shroud around it for dust collection, which does pretty good. And this piece here just lifts out if I need to do bevel cuts or anything like that. All right. So most of the time. You got a little hammer laying down on the left-hand side. Oh yeah, this was a project I made. You made that, okay. Did you make a batch of those or just one for yourself? No, I just made one for myself. That's a Brazilian ebony handle. And I found this piece of bird's eye that had this inclusion in it that I just kind of thought looked like flames. When I split the piece of wood, I could see it on the end. So this is the other side of it. Okay. And I kind of thought it looked like flames. So I made a hammer head out of it. All right, cool. All right, so that's your, that is a massive, beautiful, that you've got to be so nice to have that much storage. So obviously you've used up a lot of your wall space, so you better have some cabinets to store stuff in. My shop is the opposite. I've got the French cleat system and everything hanging up and. There's the DeWalt cabinet. All right. So we have a DeWalt cabinet. Then do we have a Milwaukee cabinet and then a Makita cabinet? No, I'm afraid not. Oh, okay. All right, Wiggis. So you would say you're a DeWalt guy for at least your handheld power tools? Yeah. And this is all fairly well organized. Yeah, you can say that again. Confirmed the most. Yeah. So a little Festool dust collection underneath, I see. Yeah, I got the little CT-15, which works pretty good. And a little rolling stool store under there as well. And then coming over here, we got my Delta drill press. I bought that a while back. It was on a good sale. And then I got that Keyless Chuck from Amazon Warehouse for an unbelievable price. I've been drilling metal on it, which I try not to do. But my other drill press, which I used for metal, got dropped while it was being moved. So it doesn't drill straight anymore, so. How long ago did you move into this shop? I've been moving for the last year and a half, basically. We bought the place and then we had a pipe break, which flooded the whole place out. Oh! Just as they got that put back together, Sally came hurricane and ripped the roof off. I won't ask you if you had everything all properly insured. Yeah, we did, actually. This side of the building, luckily, was untouched, other than some leaks down the walls, which you can still see where water ran down the walls in a few places, but pretty minor all in all. I try to tell people that if you want to protect your tools from both thieves as well as natural disasters, the answer, and the only answer, is insurance, so. Yeah. It might hurt to write that check, but it feels pretty good to have written it and then get $30,000 worth of stuff back. Now, is that drill press on rollers? Yeah, it's on a mobile base. Okay, so if you have a long piece. If I need to drill something long, I can roll it on out of there really easily. All right, okay. And I've got air plumbed over there, so I can spray stuff off if I need to. And then I can run a dust collection hose over and use this little clampy thing to just kind of clamp it to the table if I'm doing wood. I think that one's a dust right one, a Rockler one. All right. Yeah, so this is my French cleat system. It's just clamp storage over here on the side. Pretty nicely organized. Yeah, that's, you know, since I've been moving stuff slow into here, I've had to, I don't bring anything that I don't find a home for, so I don't have a lot of junk, just sitting around, luckily. And then I got, I went a little crazy at Black Friday with the DeWalt storage cases here. So, you know, when they were $9.99 a piece, I got a whole bunch of them. And then the price of wood got really high, so what's gonna happen is those and those sustainers are all gonna live in an outfeed table that's gonna be here in place of that little tiny outfeed table. Yeah, so. I was gonna ask you the way you had those DeWalt's all stacked up. If you needed something out of the bottom one, what do you do with it? Yeah, there's only. What you're telling me is you're gonna put them up, you're gonna put them all in cabinets. Okay. Yeah, there's only stuff in about the top five of them. So, you know, and then unfortunately, the stuff that should go them and go in them is in this drawer. I got you. I do have a couple of messes, but I'll get that all straightened out. We all have one of those, all right? Yeah, so then we come over to the router table. I built that to match. So. Okay. This is drawers with the router bits on this side. I got, you know, the tools you need and then the extra plates all in here. Uh-huh. And then it's got the big porter cable router in there. Yeah. So, and this is all Rockler. Rockler cast iron table and lift. Ah, beautiful. Yeah, I really like it. This is my old router table, which I keep around. There's one project I do that needs an eighth inch round over on it and this thing I just keep set up now to do that. So it just always has an eighth inch round over in it and I just whip them on through there. So, but that thing I've had, I've had that a long time, probably 15 years now and it's done all right. Yeah, a lot of people want to know why a person needs more than one router and answer as well. There's different sizes as well as the best thing to do is have some different bits that live in different routers and then you're ready to just grab them and use them. Exactly. And then I got Grizzly bandsaw. It's got the extension on it, so it's 12 inch resaw and I got the Laguna Resaw King blade. Uh-huh. Wow. It just leaves buttery smooth. Oh, yeah. And that was your anniversary edition, wasn't it? It was, yeah, which you can still buy somehow, even though, like, I bought it 10 years ago or more. So, and then I got DeWalt planer, Rigid Sander and that little router table. And then those two things are on little drawer cabinets I built as well. So. Straight knives or helical heads on the planer, on the thickness planer. It's got the she-lakes in it, yeah. I should have known. I should have known. Yeah. Well, right there. Okay. Yeah. So, they cut down on the noise. It seems to work better. I was dulling blades pretty quick, so it makes it worthwhile, I think. Yeah, I did the same thing, but it's funny. How your blades cost you almost as much as the thickness planer. Exactly. And then above that, I got some wood storage. Uh-huh. All through there. It goes kind of all the way over there. It looks like he got a lot of foam insulation blown up in the ceiling. Yeah, it's all insulated in here. I don't have air-con in here yet. That's on the list of things I want to do. So. Knowing you're in Alabama without the air conditioning hot, what's your worst case scenario in there? Stay pretty simple. Well, so I kind of blow air conditioning in from the other room, and I guess we're about 80 degrees in here right now. All right. Okay. So, not horrible. It's tolerable. Yeah. Okay. That's probably the newest tool I got. Jet eight inch joiner. It's helical head. I had one of the little ridgids that just didn't have the power to go through some of these hardwoods. So. Yeah. Yeah, I had a little Q-Tec. They don't, they don't go by that name anymore. Benchtop. I'm sure it was the operator error, not the machine, but I just can never get good results. And so now I have the eight inch helical head, powermatic and somehow it compensates for operator error. Yeah. All right. And then. The big belt sander. I picked that up used a little while back. That thing's, that thing's pretty awesome. It'll, it'll remove some material. Yeah. And then a little more wood storage. And then back here, I got a couple of sheets of plywood, you know, with the blue foam for the track saw. And then, I got a big hose reel and track saw storage or track saw track storage. So. Okay. And that's, that's pretty much the wood shop. We're back. Well, I guess we forgot the table saw, which is here in the center. Oh, I like it pretty much. Oh, I forgot this little puppy. Yeah. Oh man. That's the PCS. What, or is that the industrial? No, it's the PCS. And it's 1.75 horsepower. This is the first place I've had that had 220. So I may convert it over, but it's, it's doing its job right now. So I do have the, I do have the Wixie digital gauge on it, which is great. And then the Jessum, Jessum guides are on a Magsway. And was that a beer refrigerator down below there? What was that? No, that's a little craftsman toolbox that I picked up when Sears was going out of business. It's about their cheapest model, but it fits under there. It used to slide out this side until I put the digital readout, but now it'll slide out the back where I can get to it at the end. Yeah. Well, that's a pretty nicely upgraded saw stop. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I really liked that saw. I was a tech shop in Durham and they were doing a demo and the guy actually was, getting ready to do the hot dog test and put his hand into the blade accidentally. He was a hand. And nobody filmed it because everybody was waiting for the hot dog. And this was probably 10 years ago now, maybe more than that. And I was like, all he had was a little red spot on his pinky finger. And I was like, okay, but I'm getting a table, a new table saw is gonna pop us off, you know. Yeah, I know it's expensive, but you know what, $2,700, $3,000, you know, save up for it, budget for it, but do it is my opinion because the hand surgeon is a quarter million dollars. I mean, to put your stuff back on. So it gives me a certain level of comfort. I wish my band saw, my drill press, my thickness plate, I wish they all had some sort of device that would protect against my stupidity, but so far the only one I've found is a saw stop, so. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I wish you could get it in more things. Well, that is one beautiful workshop, is you got anything else hidden anywhere, you know? I didn't see a lathe, I didn't see... Well, this door. Oh no, oh no, here we go. Oh my God. So this was intended to be the metal shop, but some of the woodworking tools made their way in here. Okay. So coming through the door, got a laser cutter engraver here that I got as a kit and put together. Well, I got some of the parts as a kit and then had to order everything else from, you know, a dozen different suppliers. Yeah. You could probably order everything from Amazon now, but, you know, 10 years ago when I built that, not so much. Yeah. And then my Delta Rockwell lathe from 1942. So still, still kicking along with the original motor down there. Does desk collection ever work on a lathe? I've never seen anybody using a lathe where there wasn't crap all over the place. Oh no, stuff goes everywhere, but what it does do is it gets all the fine. You know, all the powder really does get sucked into the dust collection. You have big chips all over the place, but I'm not too worried about breathing those. You know, I'm more worried about that real fine dust that just kind of gets everywhere and you breathe and... Yeah. So... You don't have one of those, how much like Ashley Harwood with the jet pack on the back and all that stuff? No, I have one of those. Oh, you do? Okay. Yeah. Brandon, is there anything you don't have? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I don't have. All right. I mean, there's always stuff to look at and buy. Okay. And then here's my CNC machine. I built that. It's on a torsion box table and the inserts, there's inserts in all of those holes, but they go through the table and I can hook a vacuum to the bottom and use it as a vacuum table too. Oh. So you can screw stuff down to it or whatever. Is that common for people to figure out how to use their CNC as a vacuum table? That's the first time I've heard of anybody doing that. You know, if you're doing thin goods or stuff that is real flexible, sucking it down to the table is really great. You know, if I'm like, I've done some stuff in like real thin, you know, three millimeter like door skin or luon. And it's really hard to hold it down because it loses so much structure as you're cutting it. Yeah. So if you can use the vacuum table to suck it down and especially small parts, just don't go flying everywhere. So. I got you. So the vacuum part of it is more to aid your assist in the cutting the... Right, yeah. Not as a vacuum press normally per se. No, no, no. No, it doesn't have that kind of suction. But if you lay a sheet of plywood on there or whatever, it'll hold it from sliding sideways. You can still lift it off, but it doesn't move around sideways on you. All right. And this is a pretty large one. I think you told me earlier that you started off much smaller and then you've done most of this DIY to make it larger. That's correct. Yeah, this is a one of a kind. So I used the small ones to make parts for the bigger one and went that way. Okay. It's about to get its seventh upgrade. I'm gonna replace that DeWalt router with a three horse spindle, water cooled spindle. Oh. That's... This is the project cart for the spindle upgrade. So... All right, cool. So that's gonna happen here in the future. And right now I'm still running dust collection off of a shop back that's down underneath it. But that's gonna get hooked in right there. Cool. So I'm gonna hook that into the main trunk of the dust collector. So... Sometimes we all wonder if we are ever gonna get everything done and get to busy woodworking, but then we think of one, just one more thing I gotta get done first, but... Yeah. You do some knife work or just metal grinding? More I'm gonna. Yeah. I used one of these. I took a knife making class and used one of these and it was just so nice for grinding metal compared to a bench grinder or whatever. Right. That I decided to build one. So this is the Housemade Revolution 4. So a guy online, you can buy the kit. You can even... It comes basically with almost everything you need now except the motor and the wheels. I had to source my own steel tubes for it, for this one. But it's on a VFD. So you can, you know, go. It's a three phase motor running on 220 with the VFD so you can have speed control and everything else. Cool. Yeah, and then welding. So I got a TIG welder here and my old trusty MIG welder from the 90s over here. I've had that a long time. I'm pretty decent with a MIG welder. I'm pretty awful at TIG welding. Yeah. I'm working on learning TIG. There's some of us that don't even know the difference between the two. Well, so you're safe with me. All right. And then mountain some deer skulls for my father-in-law. And then the big Clearview Cyclone dust collector with the Benford bin. Uh-huh. And is that that service in your wood shop as well, right? Yeah, yeah. That goes all the way over there through the wall and into the wood shop and then a little bit on this side too. How many horsepower is that? That's a five horse. Oh my God. Pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty good. And then I got a welding fixture table here, the bunch of clamps and magnets and stuff. What have you done with the welding mostly? What have you created? Or is it repair work for farm machinery or what? No, not really. Most of it's just making stuff. I made, my wife made some jewelry and she's got it in the shop so I made a stand for her to display her jewelry on. I make some wind sculptures and some kinetic sculptures and things. So just kind of a bunch of stuff, whatever new it's doing. So still in the hobby category? Yeah, yeah. I've made like 30 or 40 of those wind sculptures so. Yeah. Okay. Enough of those. Starting to get me on hobby there. Yeah. More aerials. I got a 20 ton press. All right. So this is the metal cutting bandsaw. This is a cool thing. This is a 1952 Atlas seven inch metal shaper. So that ram up on top, if you've never seen a metal shaper, you should look them up because they're really cool. But that ram on top slides back and forth and it just shaves off the metal that you clamp into this vise. So this part just kind of slides forward and backward and just shaves metal off. They've mostly been replaced with mills now, but they're fun to operate and really cool. Okay. Well, you know, your wife must really be mad at you because you don't give her any space for anything. Well, she gets her own space. She does? Oh yeah. Well anything else in your man cave first? You know, just a little Harbor Freight metal lathe. There's that drill press I was talking about that's got a wobbly spindle on it now. But it's pretty old. It's from the 70s. This was actually my grandfather's that I got in the 90s when he passed away. So it's traveled quite a bit. I was kind of sad it got damaged, but... Yeah, so it got damaged in a fall, you said while moving it? Yeah, the forklift I was using blew a hydraulic line and it dropped, the carriage dropped. So it just ended up on the ground, stuck between the trailer and the forklift and it wasn't good. Hydraulic fluid spray in everywhere. Yeah. Tears flowing everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Well, at least it didn't do it on the sawstop. All right. And I've got a little welding curtain here I can pull across this doorway. My seven year old runs around here and he knows that, you know, if that's closed, don't come in. So... How many kids you got? Just the one. You don't say just when you're talking about kids because one is a handful. Yeah, so one of those. Typically they don't have brothers or sisters to keep them busy. Yeah. But if you come over this way, you see my air conditioner blowing cool air at me. And I've got, I've got a little table here and a desk and a toolbox and the most important part, my kegerator. Oh, there you go. So if you need some beer. A little window into the shop. Oh. And look in there. That's cool. They can see if you're doing something dangerous before they barge in and tap you on the shoulder. Exactly. And then the rest of the building. Oh. So this is where we go out of the small workshop area. This, this gets into a large workshop. Huh. You said that. This is my wife's art studio over here, which we both spill into this main space sometimes. So. Oh, cool. What does she do primarily with her artwork? She paints. That's one of her paintings there. Okay. Yeah. And then she's got a bunch going on here. Those are some more of her paintings that are in progress. Yeah. I don't know what else she's got going. She's got a couple more over here going on. So. My wife is not going to get to see this video. No way. And then this is kind of an entry way area. We've got a 3D printer and a vinyl cutter, which I use that vinyl cutter a lot more than I would have thought. Right. Okay. Doing masks and patterns and stickers. And then that's my wife's office. I'm supposed to be putting a bunch of built-in bookcases in there, but the price of lumber got a little ridiculous. So. Yeah. That's your little Rolls Royce. Yeah. It's leaking in a few dozen places. So I got to get that straightened out. This building that we're in used to make models. That's what they did here. They built it and had a shop-making models. And we found this model of the, one of the water treatment plants in California. Actually, the San Jose one. Yeah. Strap to the ruch, or strapped to the rafters. So I don't know why it never got sent out, but. Huh. So that's a kind of work that they did. Yeah. So. So we got a paint room, which this was here when we got it. I added the filters. They had a different kind of setup. Yeah. And I got a little blasting cabinet in here too. My air compressor's right on the other side of the wall and these things kind of take a bunch of air. So. Well, I could use that room right now about ready to paint a trellis and with all the little cross beams and everything is like, okay. I do have a little miniscule spray painter that I'm going to use for about the third time. That's your bike? Yeah. That's my Harley. It's a 04. Okay. Road King. All right. I'm going to bring you back. Let's switch back to your front camera unless you got anything else. And by this time. Yeah, I think that's. You know, I think by this time we've got everybody that is watching this totally upset with you. And so probably shouldn't show them anymore even if you have it. Yeah. Well, there's the back shed. Okay. Hey, you were working on getting some sort of rule change in Alabama regarding home beer delivery or something? Yeah. They are. Right now, it's illegal to deliver beer, you know, Instacart or anything. And I think in October that's going to change. But we'll see how Alabama's alcohol control board interprets the law. Okay. The lawmakers make the law and then the ABC interprets it to what they want it to mean. Okay. Well, I got to tell you that was, I'm here filming and I forget that I'm filming I should be switching cameras in Texas, but I'm so mesmerized by all of your stuff in your shop. And so, so very jealous, but I'll live with it. So Brandon, thank you very much. That was great. Stay safe in your workshop. Anything, is it not a fair thing to say anything else you want to say and then put a guy on a spot, but we'll just leave it there. Have you got any advice for people about workshop organization? Not really, you know, do what works for you. I basically laced up out and look at where I leave it when I'm done using it and then try and have it have a home near there. Okay. All right. So, you know, if I get a bunch of tools out I look at where they end up and then I try and find homes for them near there so that that's where they'll be when I need them again. All right. Cause that shows you what your production flow is. So start organizing according to your flow. So, all right. Okay, well, I'm going to switch now just to me and I want to tell everybody this is just one of a series of workshops tours that we're going to do in the future. This is about our fifth or sixth one. I got two or three in the old editing jar. And if you like these, then the only way to keep them coming is for you to hit a like button. If you didn't like it, hit the thumb down button twice. That way, Brandon and I will know that you really didn't like the workshop tour. And subscribe and stay safe in your workshop. Small Workshop Guy, signing off.