Time for Spring Cleaning and a New Contest

The shop here at Popular Woodworking is an interesting place and when people drop in to visit for the first time, they are anxious to see it. Typically, first-time visitors say the same things.

 “You would never think a shop like this would be in a building like this.” This is understandable, as our offices are in a semi-suburban office building, and our shop occupies one corner on the ground floor. The next comment is usually related to the visitor recognizing something they have seen in the magazine, such as a workbench or a toolbox. “So that’s the Roubo.” The size of the shop (rather small) is almost always mentioned. And there is one topic that I’m sure every visitor notices, but so far only one has mentioned out loud. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Our shop wouldn’t seem so small if it were just a working shop, but given the nature of the business we’re in, it is also our photo studio, testing laboratory, occasional conference room and lounge. The only loading dock in the building is out our back door, so now and then some other department will need to send or receive a truckload of stuff. So we deal with some issues other shops don’t have. I won’t call them problems because that would be complaining, and we have nothing to complain about.

Other magazines list a position of “shop manager” or something similar on their mastheads. We don’t have one, and can’t imagine what we would do with one. We take care of our own equipment, build our own projects and try to keep things orderly. But we have to rearrange on a regular basis to accommodate incoming equipment, new projects and things such as cover shoots. Maybe a shop manager could find a better method than we have developed. We tend to clean the corner we intend to photograph and push everything else out of the way. To the keen disappointment of our art director, we are not the tidiest people in the world.

This is the issue that only one brave soul has mentioned when visiting our shop, and the way he put it was, “Man, you guys are a bunch of slobs.” In our defense, he had dropped in unannounced on a bad day, but truth be told, he is right. It’s time for us to clean the shop.

One of the things that works against orderliness is the fact that people keep sending us stuff. Manufacturers want us to test the latest and greatest tools, and we never know what to do with them when we’re done. Again, this is not a complaint, but when it’s time to clean, these things have to go somewhere. And for every new table saw or whiz-bang router joinery jig that shows up in our mail room, we receive three or four cordless drills. It’s understandable; cordless drills are an incredibly popular tool, and tool companies are constantly competing to come out with a newer, better model. Over a year’s time, drills add up.

So here’s where the contest starts. Some time between now and April 1, we will be having a grand and glorious cleanup of our shop. To make it entertaining, we’re going to count how many cordless drills we have in our possession. We honestly don’t have a clue, but we know they are everywhere. And we thought it might be fun to let our readers guess how many there are.

Submit your best guess via e-mail by midnight on March 31, 2009. Also, include your name and a way to contact you. On April 1, 2009 we’ll announce the winner,  who will receive (and this should come as no surprise) a new cordless drill kit. Only one entry per reader please, and if there is more than one correct entry, we’ll make a random selection from them.

In between now and then I’ll post more photos like this to help:

How many cordless drills do you see in the pictures above? How many more do you think we have lurking about the shop?

— Bob Lang

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