Two machines (potentially), one small shop?

1

Its getting close for me to make a decision on my work bench (build vs buy) for the Elite foreman. My old Journeyman is reserved for a friend, but he recently told me that he might not be able to purchase it. I am leaning towards keeping it now, since I typically do long carvings and it would improve my bandwith. Maybe I could do the upgrade path in the future for the journeyman and have 2 elite machines :sunglasses:.

This definitely poses a space problem for my smallish shop. Has anyone built a 2up table for 2 machines stacked on one another? Curious of what challenges they faced. I was eyeballing the kreg table, but it seems pretty light for 2 machines. If its not, is the 2nd row height of bench rails adjustable, and is there enough space to fit another machine underneath?

I’ve considered mounting the journeyman to the wall and mounting the elite on a table, but this is less preferable because all my wall space is taken and I’d have to make room for it. From what I understand in a different forum posting, the elite cannot be operated (nor stored?) vertically, so a double vertical table is probably out.

If you have two machines and a smaller space, what was your solution?

2

I was going to suggest exactly this. Mark did a video that he linked here where he showed how he nested a machine on a rolling base, under a working surface. Easy to move, easy to get to the front and the top, stows away nicely.

There was another post where an individual used a Racor PHL-1R to host his machine up to the ceiling. Looking at Racor’s webpage, it wasn’t secured with https and none of the store links actually seemed to be legit (some were broken and some possibly led to compromised url paths). If you search for 4x4 ceiling storage lift on Google, the solutions are all in the $1,500 ball-park. Fleximount had one for $200-ish but I have zero experience with them.

You could probably figure out how to build your own lift if you wanted, but personally, I like your first idea and I think you were moving in the right direction by keeping it simple.