About us

Your shop is a tool. If it is poorly wired, badly lit, choked with dust, or organized by accident, every project you build in it suffers. The Workshop Journal treats your workshop as the most important build you will ever do.

This site covers workshop design, setup, and infrastructure — electrical planning, dust collection systems, air filtration, lighting, layout optimization, tool storage, and climate control. These are the unglamorous decisions that determine whether your shop is a productive workspace or an expensive garage.

We have wired sub-panels, run 4-inch duct through basement shops, installed cyclone separators, and rearranged every machine in a 400-square-foot space to find the layout that actually works. That experience drives every guide on this site.

Workshop electrical is where most online advice gets dangerous. We cover dedicated circuits, sub-panel installation, 220V outlets for cabinet saws and dust collectors, and GFCI requirements — with NEC code references, not guesswork. Every electrical guide has been reviewed against current code.

Our dust collection guides go beyond “buy a shop vac.” We cover CFM calculations, static pressure loss, duct sizing, blast gates, separator design, and the real-world performance differences between systems at every price point.

Every recommendation on this site has been tested in working shops. We do not publish anything we have not installed, measured, or lived with ourselves. AI can describe a dust collection system — it cannot tell you that your 4-inch flex hose is killing your CFM, or that your fluorescent lights are giving you a headache because they flicker at 60Hz. That knowledge comes from time in the shop, not a training dataset.