To be honest, our favorite category of furniture isn't the nice stuff made for clients or even the nifty transforming kind. It's shop furniture, the unseen workhorses that are used to created the first two categories. We love seeing what shop fixtures craftspeople use and how they hack them for greater efficiency. So here are our favorites from this year:

Lifelong builder Les Hastings wowed us with plenty of process photos for his incredible design for a folding portable workbench:

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Cabinetmaker Timothy Wilmots knocked our socks off with his very well-thought-out transforming six-function shop cart:

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Wilmots also showed us how he built the thing:

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Furniture designer Daniel Moyers put an amazing amount of attention into building his workshop tables, which we went over in great detail:

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Douglas LaMont created this wonderful and functional Ex Machina Drafting Table:

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French craftsman Boris Beaulant designed and built this compact, clever contraption for height-adjustable drill press table outfeed support:

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Malcolm McGrath hacked a hydraulic lift to make the coolest-ever table saw outfeed table:

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David Barron showed us the smart modifications he made to his Moxon vise to increase its speed and utility:

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Tired of your vacuum hose snagging on the workbench edge? Australian cabinetmaker David Stanton came up with this inexpensive fix:

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Jeremy Schmidt showed us his design for DIY hardware organizing boxes that won't slide around inside a drawer:

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Lastly, if you need to work in the field, remodeler Steve Olson came up with this jobsite alternative to Festool's MFT table:

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More of the best of 2017:

2017 Best of Furniture Design

Our Favorite Transportation Stories from 2017

2017 Best of Transforming Furniture

The Best of Footwear Design in 2017