Since I am a full-time wheelchair user, I cannot have a basement shop and we have no garage. Therefore I have my "shop" upstairs in our living space. I have a Harbor Freight 8" X 12 VS lathe and a Rikon 8" slow speed grinder witha Wolverine sharpening jig. I used a forty year-old Craftsman eight gallon shop vacuum with a Rockler plastic dust hood for lathe dust collection. I also have Ryobi 16" scroll saw which is used for cutting blanks to length. Blanks are drilled on the lathe using a PSI blank drilling chuck on the headstock spindle and a jacobs chuck in the tailstock. Blank trimming using a pen mill or a disk mounted on the lathe headstock. Lathe tooling is on a "home-made" MDF Carousel which holds mandrels, centers, drill chuck, knock-out bar and the like. The nested cabinets behind the lathe hold busings, extra tubes, drill bits, etc - one small drawer for each pen design. The large drawers hold pen blanks - one drawer for each pen species.
