Mark Roberts is a product designer and luthier, and he made the top four of our Workspace Challenge for having one of the densest, most functional workspaces submitted. (He would have placed higher in the ranking if he'd had call-outs, which would have greatly increased the viewer's understanding of his space.)

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My name is Mark Roberts, and I am a luthier of contemporary stringed instruments of museum quality, living and working in beautiful Portland, Oregon. My workspace is a study of efficiency. My background as an industrial product designer has greatly influenced and improved my design and building processes.

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Above the bench at hand are instruments in various stages of construction.

One wall with a window for natural light hosts a workbench intended for more heavy lifting and small mechanized tool work. I tend to design and build based on "systems" that share a common element. That allows me to design personalized jigs for replication work, that get mounted/clamped to this bench via a long embedded T-track on the surface of the bench.

As I use a number of jigs that attach to benches for their operation, i decided to add in a 4' piece of T-track onto one of my large benches. Hold down dogs/clamps or screw knobs make quick work of the attachment.

Instrument holding fixture with new T-track.
When not in use this gets stored away under the bench.

The cork and foam lined holding panels are quite flexible and will conform to deeply rounded bodies. The black nylon webbing is a safety strap that resides under the bottom of the instrument. No surprises. It is velcro adjustable in length to size of various instruments.

Routing the inset slot.
The dust screen dust collector on the Bosch Colt works well by the way.

Riser Bench

Also along this wall are a drill press with a customized table for dust collection, a small detail/cutoff bandsaw, a rolling cabinet that houses an air compressor and a surface that has binding routers systems of my design, as well as a router table. This rolling cart also has embedded T-tracks on its surface for clamping purposes. Above the rolling cabinet is a wall mounted cabinet that houses a stable of smaller hand held routers.

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This shelf will hold ten laminate routers.
Each one setup for its' own job.
Adjust it once, set it, use it.

Beside the rolling cart is another bench that holds a bench top belt sander/disc sander combo, with customized jigs for applying custom radiuses to fretboards.

The Jet micron dust collector does a great job, and I am putting my Ridgid belt and sleeve sander to a lot of use. Easy to attach various jigs to it for repeatable profile sanding of parts.

On an adjacent wall is a "Finishing Bench", where detailed hand work and instrument setup and French Polishing takes place.

Beneath this bench are various holding molds for all the instrument designed and sizes I build. Within the bench are drawers; each one designated for separate purposes ( bridge/nut/saddle, pickups, shaping/design tools (French curves, angles, etc), inlay materials). Above the bench is a long magnetic strip holding all the various hand tools needed for fretting, setup and installation purposes. The shelf above the bench holds French Polishing (shellac + resins) solutions, strings selections, a small portable riser bench, and tunes.

Always a little rearranging. Finishing/set up bench and the Salon bench/Gobar station.....and about half my instrument holding molds down below.

Everything is within arms reach.

Another adjacent wall has a bench for storing my shop made fretting press, more inlay materials, and a large selection of soundboards, and back/side wood sets.

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Next to that bench is a large pegboard wall, with many templates for various instrument bodies, neck templates, headstock templates, and tools.

Further down the wall is a 6' rolling shelving system that stores my section of shop made exotic wood binding and purfling materials, and additional instrument molds. 

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Another bench on this wall stages my shop buffer. Beneath the bench are various storage files containing various clamps, bridge and headstock veneer woods.

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A lot of items are getting stored on three 6' tall rolling shelves with locking wheels.
They can all be rolled out of the way and against wall mounted shelves. As needed they can be rolled up to a work area, or left just for storage of parts and materials.

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In the center of the shop is a long "Large Power Tool" island, with its' own dedicated heavy dust collection system.

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On this island is a shop made drum thickness sander, large bandsaw, rolling tool cart with a horizontal belt/drum sander mounted on it, and a granite topped table saw.

14" Jet Deluxe with a Kreg fence and attachments is all I need for processing larger wood, and resawing up to 10" thick. All my blades come from Louis Ittura, of Ittura Designs, out of Florida.
Can't say enough good things about Dust Deputy venturi accelerators when attached to a standard shop vac, for smaller vacuuming jobs. They suck!

I like magnets. Sometimes there's just not a hook around.

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Congratulations, Mark! Please keep an eye out for an email to claim your Joey Roth Woodblock!