Staying Safe In The Wood Shop

(wood shop safety)

In a discussion on Facebook this week, some comments on shop safety came up, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to show some of the things we do to help keep ourselves safe in the shop. This is some of the gear that I wear on a regular basis. When using most tools, I will usually wear the earmuffs, the particulate filter and safety glasses. When I'm using a tool that has the potential to throw up a lot of chips, I wear the hard hat with full face shield.

Richard has similar safety equipment, but since he also sprays lacquer, he has a ventilated face mask that has filters designed to protect against chemicals (the filter I use just protects against particulates).

One other thing we do to keep ourselves safer is to keep a clean shop. We have an excellent dust system to pull the dust out of the room, plus we run several filters (like the one shown here) that constantly pull fine dust from the air in the shop.

I really like natural knots in wood, and think they make great tone holes (at least when you can get the tree to cooperate and put them in the right places). Here is the soundboard of an instrument I am building that has natural knots for the upper bout and dragonflies for the lower.

Close up of the upper bout.

Close up of the lower bout.

Some of the instruments in the finish area. You can also see some stacks of sand paper that are used to sand between coats of finish, and the blue painter's tape that we use to keep lacquer from getting on the fretboards (we will put fretboard oil on the fretboards after they have been polished).