Original page created on 22/02/2017.
At the risk of disappointing you, I confess humbly: I did not invent the butter slicer nor the wheel. In this section, I pinch others’ inventions, and I bring them back to you at my sauce.
- A tool holder (above).
- A woodworker’s clamp for a workbench.
- For storing profiles.
- Architectural LED lamp.
- Router template.
A tool holder
There is an almost infinite variety of tool holders. To support my most commonly used tools: pliers, tweezers, scalpels, there is the classic wall rack, or, more modern, the magnetic bar (but I also have tools in non-magnetic materials). In both cases, you need… a wall to fix the object. Now, in the room which I use as a workshop, the walls near my table are all already occupied by shelves. So, these solutions are not practicable for me.
Spotted at Cookson-CLAL, a commercial website specializing in supplies for jewellers, this less than €10 pliers holder appeared to me very clever in its simplicity: placed on the table, it can be stored elsewhere when no longer needed. But it lacks flexibility for my needs: support too thick for tweezers, and nothing for scalpels, drill bit holders and other tools of cylindrical shape. Here is the adaptation I made of it.
Photo Cookson-CLAL
Composition
My tool holder consists of only three parts: a sufficiently wide base for stability, a thin vertical support, and an elongated-cylindrical-tool-holder rack, which I will call for more simplicity scalpel rack.
The dimensions and the materials are to be adapted to each particular case. I used only salvage materials. The base is made of 10 mm thick, 420 × 100 mm wide plywood. The support is in 4 mm thick, 420 × 100 mm hardboard. In use, the height is too low for some tweezers, 120 mm would have been better. The scalpel rack is also a 10 mm thick, 150 × 25 mm piece of plywood.
Building and assembly
The base gets a 5 mm deep, 4 mm wide groove by milling, to receive the support. It is also hollowed out with 8 to 10 mm diameter holes corresponding to those of the rack. It can be clever to drill the two pieces together — that’s what I told myself afterwards…
The bracket simply has its lower side chamfered to facilitate its embedding in the base. It will be glued on with vinyl wood glue.
The rack is perforated with 10 mm diameter holes approximately distant of 20 mm. It is glued to the support with wood glue at mid height. To me, no need to strengthen this gluing, but it’s always possible to put a screw or two from the back.
I think the following pictures are sufficiently explicit not to require more details.
The thing in pictures
And at last, I no longer lose five minutes looking where I was able to put these ?ϠѬ?₰ pliers!