Shop tour: Rolling pegboard

Just thought I’d post some photos of my one-car garage workshop and my do-it-yourself woodworking creations. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult to fit a table saw with two wings, a woodworking bench, miter saw station, planer, mortiser, dust collector, drill press and band saw and still have room to work in my garage. Even a mildly complicated build soon spirals out of control and one of the problems I used to have was leaving tools out when working, primarily because my wall-mounted pegboard was difficult to access. Clamps were a nightmare because I stored them on the garage door, on the other side of the table saw, and getting there required a combination of gymnastics, yoga and limbo dancing.

I needed a way to store my tools for easy access and even easier put back.  I came up with a rolling pegboard that I could put exactly where I was working, and could easily shove up against the wall when I needed room in the garage to work on a large piece.

Pegboards, however, can be a pain to use because the hooks always fall out. You pull something off the pegboard and the hook invariably comes with it. There are some solutions that can keep a hook from falling off a pegboard, but I’ve had those fall off too. I needed something that wouldn’t fall off but could be removed if necessary. The solution was to just run a zip tie around the hook and fasten it on the inside of the pegboard.

Of course it would be difficult to remove the zip tie if this was just a two-sided pegboard with no way to get to the inside, but my rolling pegboard panel opens up like a briefcase, thanks to the piano hinge that run along the side. There’s a fifth caster that supports the opened panel and I store my longer Pony pipe clamps inside. I have access to my most frequently used tools and the whole unit is surprisingly stable, considering the whole thing is more than six feet tall.

I also hang rulers, a level and my angle gauge from the sides of the panels. Unfortunately when I put this together, I didn’t have quite long enough sections of pegboard (see the Sketchup image at left) and had to join them, but the joins are used as tool holders as well.

I can’t quite get every tool I need on this one panel, but these are the most common ones. I need to add a holder for my drill press bits and I should just be able to add those with a little rearrangement of the layout. Fortunately that’s pretty easy with this design. I just need to cut some zip ties or unscrew the larger assemblies.