My wife wants a new headboard, after we got rid of our traditional mattress in favor of an adjustable one (because we are old…make fun all you want, I haven’t woken up in the middle of the night since it was set up a month ago). As a result the ambling pace of the knife station build had to be accelerated significantly and so two weekends of focused work brought the project to an end. The final steps were fun ones—getting the fire extinguisher in place, adding a bottom shelf, creating a grommet for the power cords, attaching the aluminum sheet to the wall, adding a magnetic bar for accessories and tools, and hanging the belt storage racks.

Here is a weird thing—after having two shops for more than twenty years I have never installed a fire extinguisher. They usually lived on a shelf, got buried by stuff, and then expired. But, a few years ago, I actually had to use one in the kitchen in my parent’s old house. My Dad was making cinnamon rolls and something caught on fire. They tried to fan out the fire and it only spread. When the fire alarm went off, I ran into the kitchen, the oven belching flames like a dragon, grabbed the fire extinguisher from other the countertop, and put out the fire. It was a huge mess, but the house didn’t burn down. Part of the mess was made from fishing the fire extinguisher out from under the sink. I decided, instead, to put it on the wall at eye level to make it virtually impossible to miss. Hopefully it will stay there until it expires, watchful but unused.

Once the grinder’s spot was chosen it was pretty easy to get the cord to the outlet, but I didn’t want it just hanging off the side, so I created a grommet. It is not fancy, just a few pieces of pine, some glue, and a few brad nails. The pine is a left over piece from the sliding rail for the spark chute. Here is the grommet.

Pretty much every workbench in my shop has two magnetic components—a mag tool bar and a magnetic parts tray. I get both at my local Harbor Freight and both can be had, by mining good sales, for around $10 total. Here is the tool bar and the parts tray:

The stuff on the tool bar all came with the grinder. It is a huge step up from the stamped parts that came with my el cheapo Craftsman drill press. The wrenches are machined and chromed. The hex wrenches are sturdy. Some of the parts on the grinder are easily taken off and put back on with the included tools so keeping them close at hand is big plus. I will tell you that the magnets everywhere approach isn’t new or innovative, but the first place I saw it was on Blake Weber’s 2020 Shop Tour. I watch a lot of shop tour videos—like a lot—but Blake Weber’s is a masterpiece of the form. I have probably watched in once every two months since 2020, picking up new tips, tricks, and tools each time. The magnets-everywhere approach has been a huge boon.

The belt racks are made of scrap 2x4s left over from the bench construction. They use the John McGrath rack design (link here). I have used this method all over the place—my clamp rack, a yard tool rail across the top of my garage, in my yard shed for off season tools, and I am using it again here. It can hold a lot more weight than belts, but the racks are so easy to make, it doesn’t make sense to do something else. McGrath’s designs are so good and so simple—they have revolutionized my shop. Instead of a random assortment of stuff I have a bunch of benches and racks that are both super sturdy and remarkably cheap and all made of the same basic building block—2x4s. The 2x4 construction works on benches (I have my hand tool bench seen below, the left and right half of the miter station, my washing station bench, and this knife station) and for shelves (I have one large paint and glue shelf in the workshop and two shelves in the garage). Like with the racks—it’s so cheap and easy it makes no sense to do something else sturdy.

I originally planned for three racks with two hooks each, but after I got them up on the wall with concrete anchors, I realized that the variety pack of Red Label Abrasives actually had six different grits, which, when added to the one 36 grit belt that came from Grizzly put me at 7 belts. Here they are with two hooks per rack:

I went back and added a hook in the middle for each of the racks, bringing the total number of hooks to nine. I hope not to have nine different grit bels, but I have a feeling that is like when I started woodworking and told myself I was going to stick to four or five router bits (at one point I had four routers…I am down to two, but you see the problem). I actually think they look better with three hooks.

As a side note I want to complain about concrete anchors. They suck. It’s like hot dogs and hot dog buns being sold separately and in different numbers. First, the bits have to be sized right or they don’t work. Fine. But at least make the bit dimension something that is stamped or printed on the driver. I lose the labels and stickers so fast that I am constantly trying to guess the bit size. And if you have used concrete anchors before you know how that goes. But that’s just the first problem—there is no allotment of screws that is small enough for one bit to sink them all. Literally by the sixth screw, the bit is basically dead. I want a box of screws that comes with the correct bit AND the correct number of bits. If you sell me a box of 100 screws, I need 10 bits. Don’t fuck around, don’t pretend like one is enough. Sell me enough to drive all the screws, just like there needs to be enough buns for an entire package of hot dogs. We aren’t three, no one eats just a weiner. One bun per dog, please. God, all of this writing about hot dogs makes me miss baseball.