Most shop thinking assumes a fixed space – a garage, a shed, a basement – that gets equipped and stays equipped. Tony’s shop is the opposite: a fully functional woodworking kit that can be deployed in any suitable space within about 20 minutes. He’s built furniture on a covered back porch, in a rented storage unit, in a borrowed driveway, and on one occasion in an empty apartment before he moved in. The mobility is the feature, not the limitation.
The kit lives in a 6×10-foot enclosed trailer. The trailer contains: a folding workbench (deploys in 4 minutes, stores flat against the trailer wall), a portable table saw, a lunchbox planer, a battery-powered bandsaw, and a complete hand-tool kit in two rolling cases. All machines except the table saw are battery-powered. The table saw runs on a generator that lives in the trailer as well. Two 4×8 sheets of plywood form the shop floor when unloaded and provide a clean, level surface regardless of the underlying ground.
The workflow: trailer arrives at the work site, plywood sheets come out first to define the floor area, workbench deploys in the center, machines set up around the bench. Sessions are typically half-day or full-day, because setup and teardown aren’t free. But the flexibility to work anywhere, and the lack of a fixed space cost (no rent for a shop building, no property taxes on a separate structure), is worth the setup cost in Tony’s calculation.
His most frequent deployment site: his parents’ driveway, where he parks the trailer, runs a 30-amp cord from their garage to the trailer outlet strip, and has a fully functional shop in their covered parking area within 20 minutes. He’s been doing this for four years and has built a complete dining table set, two bedroom furniture suites, and more smaller pieces than he can count in borrowed driveways and parking areas. Have you built a portable shop? Share your solution and your most unusual deployment location.