 All right, so we're in Portland, Oregon with Don Bean, and I'm Paul Carlson, small workshop guy. We're gonna do a tour. We've done Mike Newet up in British Columbia. We've done Gary Padger all the way over in Brisbane, Australia, and so Don is our third tour. I first ran into Don when a guy was publishing some fantastic pictures of a, I guess you'd call it a chest to me. It looked like a museum piece, and I couldn't believe anybody could build that, and they had carving and everything else, and so then he's in a group with me called Makers Mob, and so we've been conversing for a year or so over there, and I just suspect that he has a phenomenal workshop. Don, a couple questions. So are you retired or it's actively working? I still have a nine-to-five job. I'm a contractor. I build kitchen cabinets and do finish work. All right. Good. And then are you in business with your brother? Yeah, we do it together. Dennis? And so you must have a big commercial contractor shop somewhere else? We have the shop where we build cabinets is about 40 by 40. But when you come to any of your hobby woodworking, you do it all here at home in the shop you're going to show us? Yeah. This is my retirement shop. I've waited 40 years for this. All right. Great. So Don, go ahead and switch the camera, and I'm going to take me off the screen, and we'll just have your camera. Well, this is my house. When I moved here and the shop portion here was not here at all, the end of the house ended right there. I was going to add the shop, and I knew that this front porch would look a little bit small compared to the shop, so we added that timber frame front porch. And the shop sits up a couple of feet higher at its more level with the house inside floor. And I built the garage doors, the shop doors that's 10 feet tall and 16 feet wide. So here's the entryway to the shop. Did some timber framing there and built the porch. We added this shop onto the end of the house. It's a two story with a daylight basement. Here we're coming into the shop. All right. I'll just give you a kind of a overview here first, and then we'll walk through it. It's 22 feet wide and 52 feet long. The main floor, and then it's got a full basement underneath it with a walkout daylight. So here's, I'll swing around here and show you the door I just came in. And then we have my mechanics toolbox and the rollout door, 16 foot wide, 10 feet tall. This pile of lumber that's here, I posted it all put together. It was an arbor that I built for my son's wedding. We took it back apart and brought it home, and I haven't got it to his house to set it up yet. Oh, I see you're going to move it, there's a wedding at your place, and then you're going to move it to his house as a permanent fixture? Correct. Very cool. Yeah, I wasn't going to build all that for just the temporary. Okay, and in this corner, I've got a welder and a 18 inch Laguna band saw. And this cabinet houses all of my cutters. I did a side business for years where I made all the architectural curved moldings for like when you have an arched top window. Then I would custom make the molding to that radius to match the moldings that they were using. And so here's all the knives that I hand custom ground to match the moldings. And then these are all the different molding samples that I can cut with those knives. All right, my new name for you is going to be the Molding King of Portland. Yeah, yeah, I made most of the arches in Portland for all the housing that was being built. There's only one other guy in Portland that does this. Anyway, and then this is the machine that I use. It's just a paramedic molder planer. It works very similar to a planer, except that it has just one knife in it. This knife is for doing shoe mold. And then the other two spaces just has a counterbalance to balance out the weight of the knife. Oh, well. So it just runs through there and I can make straight molding too. So that's kind of a special device I've never seen or heard of, but it's for making molding. Yeah. Paramedics. And then up here, this is a timer on my wall that's hooked up to my air compressor so I can set it to only come on for four hours, or six hours or whatever, so that in the middle of the night, if it runs out of air, it doesn't turn on in the middle of the night and wake up the house. All right. Because we are next to the house. And then this is my VFD. My dust collector is a seven and a half horsepower three phase. So I'm net off the VFD. Okay. I got a one horse PowerShop Fox. It'll handle about four foot of tubing. Let's see there. I've got my metal cut offs on my hollow chisel mortiser just kind of sits down there. I bring it up on the bench when I'm using it. And then here, I've got a 12 inch paramedic with the helical head joiner. My Tormac. Is that the 700 or 750 or whatever they call it? There's two models from Yeah, T7. Here I've got a sliding miter saw and it just kind of tucks back in when I want to use it. I can just pull it out. If you look at my bench, table here, it lines up all the way down and all the tools are on the same level. Right. So whatever I need, I can share the space. And this cabinet set up here has just been my dream to always have something like this with all these drawers and all this storage. Oh, by the way, this shop has never been this clean and it will never be this clean again. I'm glad I motivated you. Enjoy it. Enjoy it till you start your next project. Yeah. So I'll just open a couple of drawers here. This is my router bit drawer. So that's 40 years of router bits collection. These are cutters that go in a shaper in pairs and they're hand-ground too. They fit in a collar and they're just essentially a huge router bit. That's making crown mold there, that one. Explain to me two miter saws. Yeah. So I've got the slider there and I seldom use that but for like doing, if you're going to compound a wider board that this miter saw doesn't. All right. So the one's the slider and the other one's not and of course the one that's not a slider is more stable, right? Right. And this is the same saw that I use on the saw but the same model that I use at work. As a finished carpenter, this saw does 99.99% of everything I need to do. I think the slider saws are overrated and just too big and bulky to be packing out on the job all the time. I make do with that and there's the most important tool in the shop, my radio. Okay. Anyway, all these drawers are just have, you know, supplies, screws. Oh, I have to open one up over here. This is, this is another one of my dreams to have is just all the nuts and bolts right there. This particular ace hardware, huh? Yeah. And this is my homemade pocket hole jig machine. Need it out of an old drill press or a little bench top drill press. Hmm. When you you're push the pedal, it winds that and runs the drill press that's set up on an angle to cut my pocket hole jig pocket hole comes through there. All right. Did you invent that or did you see some plans somewhere or? No, just just made it up just like I want a pocket hole jig and I went down or a pocket hole machine and the Craigs are like $1,300. Oh, you know, I'm like, not going there. So I built this one out of this $50 drill press that I got a garage sale. And we have a Craig on the job in the shop, but it doesn't work any better than this. Yeah. And then this lever comes down to hold your piece down while you drill it. So are you are you involved there with Dennis and building those spiral staircases and those phenomenal inside things that he posted? Or I think his wife posted? Yeah, we've done those in those pictures he did himself, but we've done three or four of them together and I've done probably 20 of them. Okay. Up here in Oregon, they don't do it that much, but we spent 10 years in Texas and every other house had a spiral staircase in it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Down in the woodlands maybe in Houston or where? I'm Dallas. Dallas? Okay. And what a bit there. This is a line bore. It's got all the little drill bits that drill the holes for the shelf pins in the cabinet. We upgraded the one in the shop and so this one came to my shop. The one we have in the shop that we build cabinets drills 42 holes at a time. All right. This one only drills 10 or 12. And so that that does that. And then this machine is what they call a hinge press and that drills those three holes in the door for the European style hinges. All right. And inserts though, so it just three holes at once, bam. What's the square footage of your shop? It's 2200 square feet, both top and bottom together. So it's it's 1100 on each level. Wow. Yeah, it's it's my dream. Then here I've just got some odds and ends of wood storage. And there's my sheet good storage. And the thing I I when I built this sheet good storage, you can't really see it from here. But each bin is progressively shallower so that I had some room on the ends to get more storage in behind. Oh, you start out with a four of eight sheet, but they're not, you know, once you cut them in half, and you don't need to use all that space. Oh, yeah. So very clever. Go ahead and from two different directions. That's a cool. Yeah, use up that space behind. Even when you're 2200 square feet, you still got to conserve space, huh? Yeah, even when you have unlimited space, you still got to you got to pack it in. There's never enough space. Here's a chair I'm designing. I started off with this one. It's made out of just two by fours ripped up and pocket hole together, working on the the ergonomics and the size to make it fit good. And it's easy to change sizes and angles with just pocket holes. So I start with that. And then I move into the second phase where I work out the joinery and refine everything. And that's what I've got here. And now the third phase will be all else. I've made up all the jigs and everything to put this together. Now I can just mass produce them and build a set of sticks. Mass produce them. And so you have a plan for that to become a product of yours to make and sell. No, no. When I say mass produce, I mean make six of them. Oh, okay. So these are for yourself? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, I have no desire to build chairs for the people. Okay. Then this is my tool wall, my hand tools. Yeah. So beautiful. And it's, it's, it's a functional tool wall. It's everything's right there handy, but it's not necessarily gorgeous like my brother's toolbox that he posted. Yeah, the chip pedal box. Yeah. But anyway, and then right on the other side of that is my, my workbench for doing hand tools. I built that back in 18 2018, put my name and date on it there so that everybody knows who it is. It's kind of the Rob Cosman style. It's got the shoulder vise on this end and the end vise here on this end. And then I've got a twin screw that I designed and built myself with. It's got bicycle sprockets and chain inside here. And, and they all have wood screws that I made. Wow. The screws and the nuts to to make that all work. I wanted it to all be homemade. Wow. Yeah, I saw an antique recently down in the store. They had it as just a display thing and it had those wood screws. And I didn't realize that guys like you still do make those things. Yeah. I actually, here I'll open this up. I don't know if you can see that working, but yeah. Yeah. And they both working, you know, some things. So you guys, yeah, YouTube made, made, showed how to do it. Erin, something like that. Young kid, did a great YouTube video on, on, on making the wood screws. Oh, okay. So you got spike tenons on the base there. Is that, was that in the Cosman design or did you just kind of make this up as you go along and take attributes from different people? Yeah. This is a lot of different vices or different things like that dead man there. That's, that's samurai dead man. I just took all the different components that I wanted in a bench and just put them all together. And this is what I came up with. Yeah. All right. The Cosman's a big shoulder vice guy. Oh yeah. And that was kind of the base. Yeah. All right. And then my clamp wall. Cool. More clamps. Obviously you never have enough clamps, right? That's right. Okay. And then I've got the parameter, not the Unisaw, 10-H Unisaw with drawers under the end for blades. And this barrel here is very important. It, when I'm bringing in a sheet of plywood, I can stand it up on edge and put one edge on that barrel. And then as I lay it down, I can just kick that barrel out of the way and run my sheet. Here's my previous bench before I built my hand tool bench. It's four foot by nine foot, two and a half inch thick maple top with drawers underneath. And I made the top out of just scraps. I'm going to come around here and show you the end, see if you can see. But it's, there's 100 pieces of wood in this little rippings that I glued together and then planed and then glued together and planed. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a great top. It weighs about 800 pounds. I'm sorry? Ways about 800 pounds. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I made it actually in two pieces. There's, there's a seam here so that it can come apart to move because two guys can only move one half of it. Okay. And then here's the staircase that goes downstairs. And while we're here, I want to show you how I access all these clamps that are on this wall that's usually unusable. But I made this plank that folds down. Oh. Walk out there and get the clamps. Oh. I want to go down the stairs so I can just reach out here and. Now there's an idea for people where they got that dead space over a stairwell somewhere. Either they're in a basement shop or something. And you've shown them a way to be able to use that wall space. Yeah. That was worth a tour right there for somebody. Now I've got my Makita track saw and that little spindle sander and grinder. That's where I grind all my knives. It just pre-hand on that grinder with a white stone. When you say all your knives, you make a lot of knives. No, that's a better device. The molding knives. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah. Yeah. That is stainless steel sink and an edge sander. And the planer, a 20 inch planer with a helical head on it also. Just upgraded to the helical head a couple of months ago. Love it. Wish I'd have done it years ago. Yeah. And the drill press. All my dust collection is under floor. And we'll see it down in the basement where it's hooked up to my dust collector drill press. And then I've got a 36 inch drum sander. Now when did you build the shop? When? Yeah. When did you build the shop? It's been like four years ago now. All right. So. All right. Well, I love it. I love it. I would buy a pair of roller skates if I had that much room. Yeah. Well, that's half of it. I will go downstairs and see the other half. A lot of what's down here is storage. I've got a daylight door here to step outside. Oh, wow. And we'll start back here. I've got ladders on the right. Got some miscellaneous wood storage there. Got this antique drill press here. The old hand crank. Yeah. Cool. It's great. It's just a showpiece. Yeah. I've got a nine foot bed lathe that I can turn porch columns with a it's got a copy crafter on it so I can duplicate. Now do you have something similar down at the big shop too? No, we don't do any lathe work at the big shop. Okay. And a little purple dust collector here. And then I've got three shapers set up here. And I can do typically you do your cope and stick and then your raised panel. That's why you need three of them. So each one is set up and you don't have to mess with it and you just build doors. Cool. And I got a metal lay there that I got from the high school. They were going to trash it. And so I got it for free. I haven't done a lot with it yet, but it's something I want to get into. And then I just got storage back here. Shelves and stuff like that. All right. We have several rental houses that we have to always maintain. So I got plumbing section and sheetrock section and painting section and electrical section. All right. Then here we've got these three doors. And this this little room is all heavily insulated in there. And I have my air compressor in this door. And here's my dust collector with the cyclone. And it goes up through the floor. Part of it's in that bench upstairs. When I want to empty it, I just have a yard debris bin that just slides in there. And I just set it out on the curb. Don? Don? It's about time to empty that. I'm sorry? It's about time to empty that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing that. That's from sweeping the floor. And how do you get rid of that much? I thought, I swear to you, what do you do with it? We just put it on the street for yard debris. The yard debris will take it. Oh really? Wow. That bin is supplied by the garbage company. Cool. Then here's my filter bags for the dust collector. Wow. All right. And we're back around. Behind doors number one, two and three. Wow. And that's pretty quiet because the way you've got it tucked away and everything. Yeah. Yeah. It keeps it quiet. I have insulating insulation in there, sound deadening insulation in there that keeps it pretty quiet. I mean, you can hear it running upstairs, but it's not at all annoying, including the air compressor. You have to listen for the air compressor to run. Yeah. Well, that is a cool workshop. Oh, and my lighting. I love, I got LED lighting, two runs down there that just makes it like the best shot I've ever been in. No, before you go upstairs, where's the best view of your side yard and all your flowers and all your stuff that you do when you don't want to ingest sawdust? Well, here's my backyard. Is this all your wife's work or a lot of it yours? This is the wife's deal. She takes care of the yard. We have the high school baseball field, practice field, football practice field in the backyard. So we get all that grass and don't have to mow it. And then there's the football stadium across the way that we get to hear the happy sounds from that. Oh, cool. Get a few soccer balls and footballs in your yard, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I went, one of my boys was playing soccer in junior high and I kept kicking the ball over the fence. I went and knocked on the person's door and see if we get the ball back. She gave me about 15 of them. So he was pretty happy. All right. Well, that was, that's what a real workshop looks like. And man, you're going to, when you do decide to retire or if you ever do, I'd look to, you probably never will. You guys will probably work forever, huh? Well, someday I plan on it. When I retire, I'll retire to this shop. Now, who mentored you? Did you have a father who was a contractor? I mean, how did you guys, and I know your son, you're getting your son into this. So, No, not my son. Dennis is getting his son, but my son wasn't interested. He's a computer guy. Okay. My dad was a logger up until I was in high school, and then he started playing Finnish carpenter and that's, but for whatever reason, I always wanted, even before that, I wanted to work with wood. I got my first work bench when I was seven years old. All right. So it's just kind of in me. And Dennis too. Wow. Yeah. Well, that is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful, Don. And so you've done a lot of personal pieces. I know that, what do you call it, dresser? Hi, boy. Hi, boy. Yeah. We'll have to do a tour of the furniture next time. How's that? Yeah. I'd love to see some of what you've made. So, all right. So I hope everybody enjoyed that tour. I know I did. I'm sitting here looking at my little shop. It's like, okay. All right. Anyway, they're all the same thing. They all give you psychological enjoyment and fun to do a little tinkering and stuff. So, Don, thank you very much for the visit in Portland, Oregon. I look forward to staying in touch with you through the Facebook groups and Makers Mob and seeing more of your stuff. I love watching you and your brother banter back and forth with each other on Facebook, but you're pretty merciless with each other. So he's the older brother, right? No, I'm the old man. Okay. All right. Thank you, Don. I'm going to stop the recording, enjoyed it, and I'll have this posted in a few days. Okay. Cool. Thank you.