 Workshop tour of James Fingers Workshop in Sydney, Australia. Hola, what's up? Here's Paul Carson here, a small workshop guy. Today, we're going to go down under, and that means Australia. And we're going to see a fellow named Fixit Fingers. Anyway, that's his YouTube name, Fixit Fingers, James Finger. And he's a scientist for the government there in Sydney. I've discovered him rather interestingly, I did another workshop tour, and that fellow recommended that I start following James on YouTube, which I did. Being the first thing I noticed, inexpensive tools, inexpensive approach. And I thought that that would make a good contrast to show that, hey, when you're young, when you've got family, when you've got responsibilities, you don't have to be spending more money than you should on your woodworking hobby, assuming it's a hobby. First thing I would say is, if you're a professional, fine. Get the tools that allow you to do the job, do it quickly, and make money. But if it's a hobby, make sure you're saving for college, make sure you're doing all the right things you need to do for your family and for your children, and keep your woodworking purchase impulses under control. So I'll be bringing James on in just a minute, and we'll kind of do a little compare and contrast. I'll show one of my fancy, expensive tools, and then, and you'll know how I do things with that. And then he'll show how he does that same thing with an alternate set of tools. James, how are you doing? Good day, and welcome from down under. As I said, we're going to do a little compare and contrast. But first, how about giving us the kind of the 30,000-foot view of your workshop? Tell us what kind of a building you're in and other things that you might have prepared to tell us. Thanks, Paul. Well, I am also a one-car garage with a small difference between yourself and myself in that my car has to live in the garage most of the time. And so everything that I have behind me, while I've got your standard one-car garage, I really only have, I think, 18 square metres, which I'll have to convert to feet for you along the walls. So I make really big use of the walls, firstly. And then, of course, this little workbench that I have in front of me, I hang it on the wall, and then it plonks in the middle of the workspace once the car's moved. So that's all I have to play with. So you'll notice a distinct lack of bench tools, which is why I wanted to have this conversation with Paul today. So I'm going to grab the camera now and just give you the very quick turnaround because it will be quick. Now, this is the newest area of my workspace, and it's effectively now my tool area. I've got all of my teal tools. I have a Makita fan. Let's open this up for the big party trick. So I've got the pegboard with the power tools, primarily on the back. I've got the drill, storage, and charger station underneath. And then I've got on the back of these doors the French cleats for the hand tools. And that's where the vast majority of tools live. And as I said, I don't have a lot of bench tools. So these Makita tools are my primary go-to. 18-volt cordless is how I get through the vast majority of my work. A little bit of wood storage, timber racks up top. As I said, using all of the height that I have available to me, I do need to get a bit more of a mobile timber card, I think, on. And then if we just quickly zoom in around the room, this was my old station. This area here was my first workbench, and I'm currently redeveloping that into something else. They were the first cabinets that I built with the lovely clamp rack in the middle. So that's my sort of main non-tool storage. And then the one big tool that I do have is my lovely Bosch axial glide mitre saw. And that's what passes for dust extraction in the workshop. And that's literally it. So it's one car. And as you can see, the big space in the middle with that little workbench that I pull out to do the vast majority of my work on. So let's do the compare and contrast. I've got a saw stop table saw with a safety break in it. It sits permanently in the garage and blocks my wife's car from getting in. And I put data stacks on it and I didn't see a table saw in your garage. So tell me what you do in lieu. Okay, so that is the elephant in the room really because most people say that the table saw is the heart of their garage. I do not have one. That's a slight lie. I have actually made a table saw which I needed for a specific job. It was effectively an upside down circular saw with a homemade fence. It did work. It's just that the circular saw blade is very, very small and I have to set it up every time. So I found even with that, I don't tend to use it. The vast majority of ways I get around not having the bench tools is with jigs. And the table saw, it's a versatile tool. It takes me a few jigs. Let me grab a few things to show. Now you will see a slight theme running through here and I will chuck on the quick disclaimer that these days and fairly recently I am a Craig Australia affiliate. So if you see a few of the blue tools kicking around but I will also put out there that the reason they approached me and asked me to be a spokesman is because I have used their tools since day one and I absolutely love them. And the ones that I find useful I find very little fault in. I think for a small workshop person who doesn't have bench tools you are gonna be seeing me revert to the blue branded ones. There are of course other guys out there who do similar good stuff too. This one is called the rip cut and it effectively is what's gonna help me get around rip cuts like a table saw. This sled mounts your circular saw to it. It locks down very, very accurately at whatever distance I want to do. And then it's an edge guide which allows you to make repeatable rip cuts at your set distance up to about two feet. So breaking down sheet goods so I can fit them in the back of my wagon in order to get them home from the timber store or lumber store as you guys would call them. That is absolutely brilliant. One of the things it can't do very well is angles. So the second part of replacing a table saw is a track saw. I don't own a dedicated track saw. I do have a Craig again, AccuCut which uses the same sled off the rip cut and effectively turns pretty much any circular saw into a track saw. And the last piece of my table saw puzzle is a homemade jig. The one thing that both of those pay jigs fail to do safely is cut a thin strip like a two by four into a thinner strip. So if you want to rip a two by four down the guts, it's quite difficult. So this is the little jig that I have come up with and it's a very simple thing. It uses the edge guide on the circular saw. You read my mind. I was going to ask you how you rip a two by four. So I have my very little, that's actually solid hardwood, very, very dense stuff. So the way this jig works is you put your two by four or whatever you want on there like that. And then you're able to use the included edge guide that will come with pretty much any circular saw to rip it through. None of these things, of course, are as efficient as a table saw, but they do allow me to replicate most of those functions without having to own a very large tool which I physically could not fit in the workshop. And they do allow you to keep money in your checking account. So obviously this costs about on your 30 cents. And look, the rip cut would be a difficult tool to DIY. I've never attempted to do so, but there are lots of ways that you can do track saws or edge guides to do similar things. In fact, I'm hosting a challenge at the moment, hashtag woodjigs21, runs until the end of August, which is a YouTube challenge for people to basically show us your best jigs, show us the way that you do exactly the sort of things on there, so there's a little cheeky plug if you want to get involved. Yeah, just for a DIY for that, if you wanted to rip eight foot long plywood, you can do your own eight foot long DIY track saw, right? That's just exactly that. Just set up just right. So there you can lay that edge down on your line and your saw cuts right on it. So yep, so those are easy. The only thing I do different is I put match fit dovetail grooves on the bottom and then I can hook that up to my saw stallions without any clamps up above the board. So nothing gets in the way of my circular saw. So in terms of dados, I don't really have a saw solution for that in terms of the circular saw. We'll probably get on to this again later. If I'm looking at doing dados or trenches, then I'm gonna be looking at the router table. We'll cover that in a few minutes. And a lot of people would use a router relative to doing rabbits. Now you guys have some other name for rabbits down there, aren't you? Rebates. Rebates. Freshest Australians will say rebate instead of a rabbit. Yeah, I don't know. Instead of lumbar. When you use a router, there's not much wood to take back to the store for a rebate, so I don't know why you guys call it that. But all right, sorry. Little Kansas humor. What about for a jointer? I've got a big power matting, eight inch helical head jointer to flatten boards. Of course, it cost me $2,800 US. And so, let's see what the solution is. All right. This was one of the very first tools that I bought. And you'll see another common theme apart from things made by a certain Blue American company is that I like to flip tools upside down in order to turn a handheld tool into a bench tool. This is my jointer. That goes in there. Fence goes on there. And it's three inches effectively. And some people say that size matters, but it just depends on what you're trying to do. Obviously, I'm not gonna be able to surface large pieces of rough timber, but my building style at the moment doesn't require me to do that. My joining tends to be edge joining. And you can see here, one, two, three, four, five, six, that's seven panels or lovely glued up. No gaps, very, very strong done on this lovely little machine. So it is just an edge jointer. It can also use it as a planer. Not gonna be quite as powerful, but again, for a tiny workshop, it's made of plywood. It weighs another couple of pounds. Very, very simple little solution. Would it be safe to assume that anything that you're gonna show me today is supported by a good instructional video that you have on your channel to show other people how they could create their own jointer in this case on a DIY basis? That would be a fair assumption. The vast majority of things in this workshop, I started filming YouTube about two and a half years ago, coming up to three. And from day one, I will apologize for the embarrassment, I had barely picked up a power tool before. So I've really started recording my woodworking journey from a person who is going to be cringe worthy at how dangerous and dodgy I was doing things. So it's followed the whole journey, almost everything that I've built here from this workbench to the jointer, all the cabinetry, everything pretty much has a video. All right, cool. Well, I've got a Festool Rotex 90. That is a sanding device. It hooks up to a Festool dust collection. The combination of the two cost me over $1,000. What would you, there's your oscillating sander. All right. So this little sander does 90% of my sanding work. I don't actually own a larger belt style sander, it is on the list, but I have a slight rule in the workshop that I do not purchase a new tool until it has a home to go into it. So generally speaking, I'm building the space for the tool first. And also I try not to buy tools. Basically I try to get away with what I have. I've spent an awful lot of time testing this sander out and it is just five inch, it is 18 volt battery powered. So no, it's not going to compare to a large six inch Rotex or Bosch or one of those really nice big sanders. But again, for the level of work I'm doing, I'm not doing tabletops and that sort of thing. I haven't yet found me of a very large sanding device. So it takes a bit more time, but that's pretty much my sanding solution. You did hint at a little slighter drum sanding option. Again, I had a very specific problem a couple of videos ago where I was trying to make some bookmarks out of the near thin wood. And trying to sand those with one of these would have pretty much shattered them. I needed a drum sander and so I built one. But that is a piece of PVC pipe with some failing glue on it and sandpaper around. This goes together onto a sled. And again, I'll send Paul some footage of this thing when it was in action and it's drill powered. So effectively the drill spins the small drum on here and I was able to feed through my very veneer thin bookmarks. And it is a jig. It's not meant to be a permanent addition to the workshop, but it's just another way that if you do have a solution, you don't have to rush out and buy a big tool if you can build something that'll get the job done. No, it's never going to be as good as, no, buying a lovely big drum sander. James finger do when he needs a band saw. He comes to his multifunction table, takes the router out, grabs a jigsaw, little Ruby one, so it was one of the first tools that I bought, nice and cheap, flips it upside down and bashes it in there. Haven't got the blade in. And I've got myself about two to three inches of blade to do some fine scrolling work. If you look up behind me here at my lovely map of Australia, that was actually the reason I got into woodworking. I wanted to build that display specifically. And again, with some b-roll footage, I used this jigsaw mounted there to go through and cut out all the way around there. So I don't have the height, I obviously can't resaw or do anything like that. But in terms of, it's almost closer to a scroll saw, I suppose, than a true jigsaw, a true band saw. But I can feed my small curved pieces through there and do my curvature work. Very cool, very, very cool. All right, well, you got any more tricks up your sleeve? So I've got the jointer and the drum sander jig was actually an adaption of my standard router sled. So that's just a piece of form ply. That is the trolley or the sled router in the plunge base. And again, I can use this. I've not had to have a sled larger than this, but of course you could just make it wider if you needed to. There's been nothing stopping you from doing that. Put your router in here, on plunge mode, plunge it down to the depth that you need, slide it back and forth. And you know, people have massive versions of this and you can get CNC controlled versions of exactly this for surfacing my timber down. So that is my little thickness planer. Yeah, and I, the Wood Whisperer has a really good video about doing a jointer sled or a router sled like that, router sled, I use the right term. And I actually used his video to set up and flatten my samurai carpenter workbench using a router sled. So router sled folks will do some flattening of boards, particularly when you follow it up then with some nice sanding to get it nice and smooth. And don't forget you can invest in a three or two or $300 about what 17 inch bench plane called a jointer plane. And you can actually get some exercise and flatten some boards at the same time. So you don't have to have the $2,800 device. Let's see, what do you got there? Disc sander, five inch angle grinder, again in my multi function workbench. This table is the heart of my workshop. It is the replacement for my table saw. It's on a little Ryobi sort of folding saw horse type bench. And I still remember when I spent, I think it was $100, so about $70 US dollars on that folding bench, right at the very start of my woodworking, I was thinking, oh my goodness, why am I spending so much money on such a thing that I don't really use? Or, you know, will I get value out of it? And this bench now is, it's being bashed and battered and I use it for so much. And I've got a, well, I'll show you one more thing. I am a big fan of picking things up off the side of the road. This was an IKEA desk, someone dropped two of them. It's probably about six foot, five, three foot, not quite six actually, about five and a bit. And I can pop that. So when I need a really large assembly area, again, I pop that on top of the Ryobi bench. So everything in the workshop is about being portable, being relatively lightweight so it can live against the wall and just being organized so that I can get away with not having those large power tools. Yeah, all right, so keep your eyes open when you're going down the highway. And if you don't, James will get there ahead of you. All right. So I think we've got pretty good ideas. So again, what you're just gonna set me up for here is I own a domino machine for joining boards together. And so tell me about your blue monster there. So this one here is the K5 Craig jig. And before we start getting people sort of doing the whole domino versus pocket hole thing and how this is vastly inferior, you're correct. It is. However, this machine will set you back about $200. Did you say the cost of the domino was there, Paul? Darn you. I don't know, $1,100, $1,200, $1,300. Loose tenons or floating tenons are brilliant. That absolutely, the domino has revolutionized woodworking. I will own one one day. Hopefully when it comes out of Peyton and Makita Bill one for half the price. But the pocket hole jig I am, as I said, I'm a self-taught novice. I'm still a novice a couple of years in and pocket holes like dominoes just make but joining things very, very simple. And I've had three of these machines now. I started with the K4. I won this actually in a competition, the K5. And then since becoming a Craig spokesperson here in Australia, they've sent me out the brand new 720 which is in its box. I haven't actually even opened it yet. But yeah, so I pocket hole a lot of things and not just because I'm occasionally paid to do so. I am a big fan of how simple they are. They look, they're strong enough for your cabinetry. No, I'm not gonna make a chair out of them though you probably could. They have their place, especially in a small budget or small space workshop. It's a very, very good entry level tool for joinery. I own that, that sits on my wall and it's quick to grab and what I'm gonna do just one or two really quick things. And I'm able to hide the joinery section because it's on the floor part of a cabinet or something. I will admit that sometimes I grab it because I, and I do have a video about the procedure or the exact steps to go through to set that up properly because you are adjusting it for the thickness of your material, the thickness of your screws and some other things. So if you don't like to read the manuals probably James has got a video on it, I know I do. And so there's a right procedure to go through. And if you don't, if you pull, the problem with tools is if you pull them out every two months, then you forget. Now, how was it? I was supposed to set that up, you know? If I'm doing half inch instead of three quarter inch stuff or if I'm doing two inch things. So keep those videos handy and you do a little two or three minute refresher and away you go. Where are you going to say about it? The shameless plug, the 720 is automatic. It will automatically adjust for your material thickness. That's the revolutionary change between the old system and why they're not making those old K4s and 5s anymore for the U720. It will, you put in a two by four. It's great. You put in 12 bill stock, which is probably the finished you can go. You have to adjust the drill guide that you don't actually have to adjust the jig. It makes it even more idiot-proof. Although having said that, I continually proved to be the bigger idiot whenever it comes to these things. All right. The tool technology, even in the couple of years that I've been in this game, I've only been at this for less than three years as a woodworker and it astounds me every day. And yes, I think that's a, was that everything we had on our list board or got into that one? That is, that is. And again, I encourage people to go back and view many of your older videos. They're not that old because he's only been at it three years, but so he's got to, you know, if you want to figure out some ways to do DIY and save dollars that I highly, highly recommend that you watch his videos, not mine. And you'll see how to do that. So that was very, very cool. I appreciate it. What I'd like to do now is remind the audience that FixitFingers is his YouTube channel. You don't have a web page per se, do you? I do, yes. Some of my projects, including these cabinets have plans like actual full SketchUp detailed plans. Not many of them. I don't charge for them. They're all free. It's just I do my designing on SketchUp. So if they've been designed to a good degree, they'll go on the website. And I've just got the standard blog and a few things on there that the merchant that sort of stuff too. The only last thing I'd like to check in Paul, just while I've got the mic is space is my limiter. So obviously keeping the car in, I live in an apartment complex, very small ones and 18 units here, but my car is just outside at the moment, but it can't stay there. It can only go out there while I'm in the workshop. So that's my main limit. When it comes to buying your tools, you notice I am a fan of the Makita generally speaking, buy the best tool you can afford. Makita isn't super cheap. You can get the Rogobi and the Rogobi tools are good, but I've got friends who buy them and then they die 12 months later because they're using them every single weekend. So that would be my other number one tip apart from using the walls in a small workshop is to buy the best tool that your budget will allow you because you'll enjoy your woodworking more, you'll get better results using a more accurate tool. And when you do have to make a dodgy jig, the quality of your tool can help to compensate for the shoddiness of your engineering. James, thank you very much. I have fun down under, say hello to your wife and a very, very nice meeting you through this arduous process of trying to get my software working and we'll check you on YouTube. Over and out. Thanks a lot Paul, thanks for having me. And yeah, it's been absolutely blast of the fun. We'll catch you soon. All right, see you later.