How to Build a Tool Wall | Workshop Organization Ideas | Woodworking

Today we're going to build a tool wall. This is a simple project that you can slap together with some materials you may already have in the shop and it's an excellent way to keep all of your most commonly used tools organized and easily accessible. Hey everyone my name is Tim and welcome back to another episode of Casual Builds. The channel focused on bringing you beginner DIY and woodworking content. So over the past couple weeks I've had some time in my workshop and I started looking around and really wanted to start organizing things a little bit and notice that I have a ton of tools as you can see right here that do not have homes. Half the time I'm trying to find tools that are all the way across the workshop and I rather just have one place in my shop where you know it's their home. So that's what we're going to do today we're going to build a tool wall that will sit up on this wall that you see behind me. So to start we're going to measure everything to figure out how big we can make this tool wall and then we're going to start cutting our three quarter inch plywood to size and then we'll hang it up and then we'll go from there. So let me be clear about a few things here. I'm building a wall on a wall that hangs tools. I'm basically taking a sheet of plywood cutting it down to about 60 inches wide and 30 inches tall and then screwing that into the studs. Pretty straightforward stuff. I'm making this video to show you that it's an easy project it's a great way to organize your workshop and I hope it at inspires you to make something similar. Who knows maybe you'll learn a thing or two. To cut the plywood to the height of 30 inches I set my piece on the workbench and table saw and plopped down a piece of poplar to act as my fence. Speaking of that piece of poplar I decided I wanted to class this thing up a bit and give it a little frame. The piece was slightly over seven inches wide so I set my table saw fence to one and a half inches and ripped it four times. After that I took it over to the miter saw to cut them down to length. I really wanted the frame to sit on the outside of the plywood but I was trying to make this project entirely out of the materials that I had on hand and this piece wasn't long enough. So I attached the frame to the face of the plywood used some glue and held it together with brad nails. I came back and lightened the look of everything by giving it a chamfer around the edge with my router. All the holes left from the brad nails were patched up with some wood filler. From there I sanded everything up to 220 grit and applied three coats of a water-based polyurethane sanding lightly with a 220 grit sanding sponge between each coat. Next it was time to lift this battle area up and screw it into the wall. I first measured the entire wall opening so I could align it to the center. Once I had it in place I transferred some lines of the tool wall to mark out the stud locations in the wall. I ended up putting a total of 12 screws into the sink. I'd say it's a bit overkill but it's not going anywhere. Make sure to pre-drill and countersink so nothing splits and your screws don't extend past the plywood face. Off-camera I cut out some spacers that helped me hold up the wall while I got everything aligned, leveled, and attached to the wall. So I was a little bit too eager hanging this thing up on the wall because I still need to figure out how I'm going to organize all the tools. I'm going to group everything together and it's a little bit easier to do that when it's not hanging up on a wall. So in order to do that I came up with an idea. So I'm going to measure out the dimensions on the tool wall. I'm going to cut this paper to those same dimensions. I'm going to lay all the tools down on this and then that should give me a clear idea of how I want to set them up on the tool wall. So this is what I settled on. I'm probably going to change things as I go and to hang everything up on the wall I'm not going too crazy. I'm just going to be using some screws, some plywood, just some basic materials to get it up there. So my goal is that I want to make sure that it's up there securely enough that when I use my little leaf blower in here to get all the sawdust out of my workshop that if I aim it at that wall they're not going to go flying off. Make sure you stay tuned until the end to witness the epic battle between the tool wall and the leaf blower. So let's go ahead and start putting stuff up on the wall and then we can go ahead and call this project complete. All the tools were either held up by some plywood attached with super glue and brad nails or screws directly into the wall. I started with my two speed squares by tracing the inside triangle onto some plywood and then cutting it out at the bandsaw. The combination and precision squares were held up by some blocks of plywood. I added a front lip to one of them so it wouldn't fall off from the front. Real quick, if you watched my last video you might have seen that the bandsaw blade snapped while I was using it. I highly recommend taking the time to adjust all the bearings and tension because this thing runs a lot better than before. I thought this was worth mentioning if you also have a old and used bandsaw like I do. For the 90 degree positioning squares I held those up with a few nails. I held up my table saw blade by drilling a 5 8 inch hole with a forstner bit at the drill press in a square piece of plywood and then I glued a matching dowel piece into that hole. My block plane holder was again made from some plywood but this time I added some maple edge banding around the front to add another little lip so it wouldn't fall off as easily. For my chisels I drove some holes into some plywood and then used my bandsaw to make a cut from the front of the piece to the holes so they could fit inside. I used some longer screws to hold up my hammers. And at this point I was looking at the saw blade and thought it would be cool to add two more but positioned them in a way that matched my logo. So that's what I did. Next up my file, rasp, and pull saw. I needed to get a bit creative with this one because what I ended up doing was taking some plywood and cutting it down the middle. From there I measured out each tool to see how wide and long each opening needed to be so they could drop in from the top. I transferred the same lines to each plywood, I made the cuts at the bandsaw, and then glued the two pieces back together again. For all my pencils I made a little box with the plywood base and then used some of that thin maple I had to make the outside. And that's pretty much it. I'm sure I'll add more to this as time goes on but for the time being it's a good start. And now it's time for the final test. Let's see how this thing holds up against the leaf blower. If you think everything is secure enough and the tool wall will prevail, go ahead and vote by hitting that like button.