Woodshop Layout FAQ

For ripping, plan the length of your longest board in front of the blade and roughly the same behind it. With 8 ft stock that means about 8 ft of clear floor in front and about 8 ft behind the blade, which the planner shows as the infeed and outfeed zones. Add about 3 ft on the left side for crosscutting and to stand. If you do not have that room, use the door as infeed, add an outfeed table, or cut long boards to rough length first.

Both machines need the board length on the infeed side and on the outfeed side. For 8 ft boards that is roughly 8 ft each way, minus the length of the machine bed. Planers and jointers often share a lane with the table saw because they are rarely used at the same time; the planner shows that overlap as a yellow hint, not as an error.

There is no fixed minimum. People build furniture in a 10×12 room, but in a small space machines usually live on carts and long cuts go through the door. As a rough guide: below about 150 square feet, plan around benchtop and mobile tools; a single car garage (around 12×20 ft) fits a full-size table saw; a two car garage fits a complete set of stationary machines.

List the machines that need 240V — often the cabinet saw, a 15″ or larger planer, a 2 HP or larger dust collector and some jointers — and place outlets on the walls closest to where those machines will stand. Avoid cords across walkways. Electrical work must follow your local code; have a licensed electrician plan the circuits and do the installation.

As close as possible to the machines that make the most chips: the planer, jointer and table saw. Short, straight ducts with few elbows keep the airflow at the machine high. Our small shop dust collection layout shows an example.

Yes, if you plan for it. Give the car its own bay, including about 2–3 ft on each side to open the doors, and put the machines on the other side or on mobile bases that roll into the car’s space when it is out. See the 2 car garage layout with a parked car.

The planner saves automatically in your browser (local storage) on the device you are using. To keep a copy or move it to another device, use Share link or Export → Save as file. Clearing your browser data deletes the autosave.

Click Share link and copy the link. The complete layout is encoded in the part after the # sign, which browsers never send to the server, so we never see your plan. Anyone who opens the link gets an editable copy.

They are typical footprints for each class of machine, based on manufacturer specs of several common models and rounded to the inch. Your machine, its fence rails, extension wings and stand may differ. Select the machine and type in your real dimensions; the zones can be edited too.

Yes. Export → Print to scale picks the largest standard scale that fits on US Letter or A4, such as 1/4″ = 1′, and adds a scale bar. In the print dialog choose “Actual size” or 100 % so the scale stays correct.

Shared layouts and examples open on phones, and you can make small changes. For planning a whole shop, a tablet or a computer is much more comfortable.

It is free, and there are no accounts. Everything runs in your browser, and there is no tracking.