Early February is a tough time in many shops. The weather is cold, business is slow, and you spend time thinking about other places you’d rather be. This year we had a chance to get away from that routine and visit Gary Campbell’s shop ( Islamorada Woodworks ) in Tavernier, Fl.
The weather was in the upper 70’s, ( wind chills in the middle 70’s…)and the skies were a bright blue. The water was crystal clear, and many shades of green/blue. It was Super Bowl weekend so there wasn’t as much traffic as you’d expect for the heart of Winter in the Keys. In short we had a perfect environment to run our Southernmost Camp to date.
Gary, and his son Gary Jr. have been using their machine less than a year, but in that short time they have studied what others did before them and REALLY made some excellent adaptations to their 5’by 10’PRS Alpha.
They have built one of the most stable, and versatile tables I have seen to date. A glue up of two .5″sheets of PVC plastic, with 4 vacuum zones ( each powered by it’s own vacuum cleaner type motor). They have multiple mechanical hold down options involving cam clamps, and movable stop blocks as well.
They have created their own drilling setup for doing shelf pin holes.
They have designed and built a VERY powerful dust collection foot for their 4 HP HSD spindle.
And they have used their machine to supplement their existing shop tools in a way which allows them to create very high end furniture, custom stair ways, and a variety of pieces which rival any I’ve seen to date.
In fact some of their ideas are SO good that we’ll shortly be featuring them on the Shopbot Wiki page. ( There ARE a number of Camp pix on the Shopbot Flickr page which is at;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/campshopbot/ )
We had Campers in attendance from as far as Canada for this one, and I think everyone who attended came away with new ideas to try on their machines at home. There was really a lot of information exchanged, and I think we’ll be coming back to the Keys again next Winter to see what they have implemented in their next year of operation…..
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