Turning A Bare Building Into A Functional Workshop.
Today was another first, at least for this time around. Today then I placed two big things (heavy vice & lighter bench grinder) in positions that look right for now. I finished & finalized, again for now, the position of the tool dresser and hung the first two, of many, hand tools. Compared with recent weeks when iv’e been running around like a mad thing and handling heavy and awkward sheets of plywood, today iv’e hardly moved off of a couple of square feet where i’m working to build up my new tool wall/dresser.
It’s not exactly Henry O Studley but what it is, is that many of the tools that I use in a DIY task are now right in front of me rather than being in a heap in the bottom of a crate or my usual DIY ready bag in the house somewhere.
What the cabinet is, is the top from an old pine dresser that I won on Ebay in the previous week, have modified and made a simple French cleat to take it’s weight straight into the hidden 2″ x 4″ wall battens behind the plywood. That took 3 tries to get the height as I wanted it. Today, it’s right hand door had to come off as I wanted to use that space to store my sandpaper rolls.
Looking at the main bench from the opposite direction shows that the super heavy vice is mounted and that i’m playing around with the position of the bench grinder. I had intended to use this end of the bench (in camera perspective) for my planned 3D printing farm but that’s still a pipedream for another day. That end of the bench is right where the doors are going to go and where I can fit a fume chamber and extractor duct for again – one day.
The layout of the workshop iv’e now settled as being in 3 zones : the main bench wall is one of 2 primary work areas, just behind camera view is the central ‘Island’ work table and then at the opposite side – the window or low end – is slowly getting fitted out as a dedicated storage area. The storage area job, below, starts with making up a load of dolly’s for my heavy items crates = the idea being that they will live at floor level except on little trucks with castors.
The great tool rethink.
Thus far, aside from having a dry clean and otherwise sorted workshop, what iv’e done once again, is mainly what iv’e tried before – for example my tool wall/dresser. While it works, sort of, i’m little gruntled by it now as I was the previous times I tried it. I like it that I can see many of my tools and that I remember what I used many of them for : my Hasuname for example was my first effective Japanese pull saw and I used for nearly all of the woodwork on the Pathfinder build. I found today that I have multiple sets of vice grips, adjustable spanners and ratchet screwdrivers as they all featured strongly in my boat based toolkits.
First time around was when I set up the workshop when we moved here ; the tool wall that I quickly and enthusiastically threw together didn’t even survive a year. After that I got inspired to build a rolling tool cart a la Savage and that really didn’t work as any of it’s small castors would run into a gap between the Granite stones that formed one level out of the 5 that then comprised my shed floor – then of course it would tip over and I would have to spend the next hour putting all of the tools back in place.
The most complex build I ever finished was the Welsford designed Pathfinder and nearly all of that was built outside. What I tended to use was the bottom tray out of my Stanley brand rolling tool chest – a lot like using a simple wooden tool tidy that i’d seen many years before at the boatyard. I used a simple bucket as I had few tools and a bucket could be quickly run up a mast or go with me as I climbed the rig. The actual boatbuilders all had smartly built tool chests stored in the back room of the machinery shed – I wasn’t supposed to even go in there. What the boatbuilders tended to use though was a simple bench tidy to carry the specific tools needed for a job and so that the apprentice wasn’t running backwards and forwards all day twixt current job and tool store.
Today, i’m likely to do some work at the main bench although that will slowly get more and busy with machinery ; equally though i’m as likely to lay up a job on the big work table and if it’s a really messy or dusty job then it’ll be outside on the old boatbuilding bench cum strongback. Thus I need a way of organizing and carrying my’ ‘day’ tools so my thoughts have gone back to Pathfinder build days and my simple solution then – a tool tidy except I would like to build a ‘posh’ version.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 