Situation Update (III)

OK, as promised, now a few pictures of the new workshop. It’s clearly all very much still work in progress.

This is the view with the entrance door (a proper house door with lock and frame locks and even a mailbox) and towards the right of the door. You can see the two new windows, and on the far wall there’s the brand new distribution box with the armoured cable going in. I have a 35A supply, should be enough even with the extractor and the lathe and the heater all going at the same time. Also visible on the left edge is the cupboard I built into a recess. As you can see, it’s already filling up with “stuff”.

This is a view slightly more to the left, showing the cupboard in full with all 4 doors. It also shows the LED panels I mounted on the ceiling. They provide an excellent light, and are definitely something I’d recommend to anybody.

In front of the cupboard is the radial arm saw I inherited together with the house, a proper deWalt shop saw. I have already used it quite a bit, and it is in very good condition and works like a charm. Eventually this saw will sit back at the wall, more or less where it is now, with a sliding compound mitre saw (yet to be purchased) to its left and some decent tables left and right for longer work pieces.

In the foreground you see my makeshift work bench, two simple ??? with a 2 pieces of 2×2 mounted on the top to allow cutting and assembly of bigger items (such as cupboard frames and doors). This will eventually disappear, and I will keep the trestles underneath the tables for the radial arm saw.

Now a view towards the other end of the shop. In the foreground is the table of the radial arm saw and in the middle on the right you can see the same makeshift work bench, and the a doorway through into the small room on the left hand side of the shop, with the 2 doors for the cupboard in that room leaning against the wall.

Now we move into the small room on the right of the entrance door. It’s about 3.3m x 3m, and will become my “clean” room, meaning I will use it mainly for painting and decorating. At the same time it will house my chip extractor and compressor, and what you see in the picture is the soundproof cupboard I am building for these two items. The windows have triple glazing (wasn’t that much extra money) and with the sound proofing I should be able to work at night without disturbing the neighbours (always an important consideration!!!).

At this point, the insulation has been fitted, and you can see some wooden slats with foam screwed to them, in readiness for some wall pieces to be hung onto the French cleats. However, I have change my mind about that. Since I don’t actually need to have solid walls in there, I have now simply clad the entire inside with cloth (dust sheets from a recent paint job in the house), as you can see on this next picture.

So here we have the same cupboard, but now with the cover in place. As you can see, there’s a double plug point for the chip extractor and the compressor, and behind the cover on the top and right, there’s a cutout in the backboard and the insulation to allow the dust extraction pipe to come through. There’s also space in that opening for the compressed air pipe to go out and for a bundle of cables, which will give me a switched extractor (microswitches on each blast gate, wired up to a relay which will activate the extractor whenever a blast gate is opened, saves a lot of walking).

The frame on the floor is where the support shelf for the items will rest, dampened against the floor. We’ll see how well that works.

And finally a view of the rest of the “clean” room. Where the camvac sits on the floor, there will be two kitchen drawers units (salvaged from the old workshop), one left and one right, with a 80cm or 90cm deep worktop across as work surface. Two wall units will be hung on either side to provide storage for paints, lacquers, dyes and stains and whatever other things are needed for finishing.

So there you go. I’ll probably publish another set of pictures once everything is in place and still in pristine condition. Apologies for the slightly shaky quality, these were all taken with my mobile phone.

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