Neighborhood Workshop

I started the Neighborhood Workshop as a way to serve the local community through creativity and making, with scrap wood and my imagination. Mower, furniture, HVAC, and electronics repair, gardening services, and instrument tuning and repair are just a few of the ways the workshop contributes to the neighborhood community.

The Neighborhood Workshop was built from an empty garage and scraps. Throughout high school, I’d go out weekly to search for abandoned appliances and collect motors. With 15 or so repurposed motors, I built machinery for the workshop. All the tools were either built from scratch, or saved from the scrapyard and restored for the purpose of neighborhood repairs and services. Below are some of the largest machines I made, from scrap wood and motors destined for the dump. Restored machinery include a 1975 craftsman radial-arm saw, a 1980s ridgid table saw, and drill press.

Homemade Bandsaw

This bandsaw was built over the course of the summer of 2022. The saw cuts both wood, plastics, and ferrous metals. This type of machine is used for cutting curves, as the thin blade can move around small radiuses. The bandsaw is also the best tool for resawing– or sawing very thick pieces of wood, including logs up to 12 inches in diameter. The wheels, pulleys, and frame were built entirely from scrap plywood and lumber. The motor powering the saw is a rusty 3/4 horsepower taken from an old furnace. The shafts and bearings are ⅝ inch. Normally, such a machine costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. This one was built for 10 dollars.

Cutting out a 3d reindeer figure on the finished saw for a gift.

Homemade Lathe

I built this lathe for the purpose of fixing furniture legs for neighbors in the fall of 2022. Many types of furniture legs are round, due to a turning process that cuts ornate profiles into them. Chips and broken profiles in such legs are extremely difficult to repair by hand. This machine can be used to make round bowls, and other round objects like cups or baseball bats. The lathe spins a piece of wood mounted horizontally between the two spindles, and a cutter is used to shape it. The display and switches are for the purpose of speed control, and I used the control board and motor from an abandoned treadmill to power the machine. A 2000-3000 dollar tool, built for 30 dollars.

Homemade Belt and Disk Sander

This is a combination strip and disk sander that I built in the Fall of 2022. This sander is used to shape and smooth wood and metal. The disk spins a piece of adhesive backed abrasive material that is capable of removing material rapidly. Metal grinding is this machine’s strength. The strip sander has a finer grit abrasive belt that is useful for finishing sanding and inside corners. I used a ¼ horsepower motor recycled from an old dryer to power both sanders. For the strip sander, I utilized crowned pulleys and belt tracking. With flat wheels, I found the belt wouldn’t stay centered on the two wheels and would slip off. But by “crowning,” or rounding the profile of the wheels so that the center of the wheel was higher than the edges, the belt would stay centered. This tool was used extensively to fix cabinet hinges for neighbors' homes.

Homemade Edge Sander

During the summer of 2023, I built this edge sander to face-sand large wooden boards. The machine serves as a general purpose wood-sander. There is yet another dryer motor on this one, at the lower right, salvaged from an old dryer. The induction motor is ⅓ horsepower. This machine uses a standard 6x48 belt and a v-belt drive. The frame was built from leftover plywood from a school project, and 2x4 lumber found in the trash. The rollers driving the belt were made from pvc pipe and bicycle inner-tube stretched over the rim for the belt to grip. I also had to make crowned rollers on this machine, too. The two rollers the belt rides on follow the same principle as with the strip sander. To prevent the belt from drifting off the rollers, I wrapped tape around the center of each roller.

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