Fuzzy Turns

Almost 2 weeks since the last post, I must make a better effort. The workshop is now finished. Well, work on the basics is finished. The floor had its final coat of epoxy resin paint, and this looks really good and sturdy. The dust extraction system is installed, with all its outlets, and the wiring to each of the blastgates is in place. The only thing left here is to glue the microswitches to each gate (couldn’t do that, as I have until tonight not found the superglue). The drawers and cupboards are mounted in the clean room, and a 80cm deep kitchen worktop is placed across the top to create a really nice big workspace for finishing and decorating.

The base for the lathe is complete, this time with a recess for my feet and about 2″ higher than previously, as I’ve always found my lathe to be a little on the low side. The mobile set of drawers is mounted on the base with the castors, and has a plywood top and some shelves at the back mounted. The only thing left there is to screw down the Tormek, and to find all the bits and pieces of the various jigs for it.

I have mounted a flexible curtain rail around the space where the lathe will go and the curtain is on it. However, the mounting arrangements are not satisfactory. I suspect I will have to fix this some time soon. I have also mounted my dual LED worklight, this time on a rail so that I can slide it across the window, which will give my much more flexibility with regard to the actual place I am lighting up with it. Since this is now plugged into a socket (previously it was wired together with the main workshop lights) I will probably have to find a small power switch for it.

So what’s left to do:

• I don’t have any tool racks yet in the workshop. I haven’t figured out where exactly they will be best placed.
• The lathe hasn’t been reassembled. This evening I got the two feet out of the garage, but I will need some help with the main body.
• The engineering lathe has not been assembled. The kitchen block on which it will sit, is in the workshop and is gathering tools, but again I’ll need help for the main body and the milling attachment.
• The radial arm saw will need a new table, from scratch, with a new fence and a proper dust extraction hood.
• I need to replace my old chop saw with a better one. This will then have the sit next to the radial arm saw.
• I haven’t got a woodworking work bench. I have some of the wood, but I’ll probably need more and then need to build it.
• There’s no distribution pipes for compressed air yet. This will need a few outlets around the workshop and also in the clean room (with a separate pressure reducer and cleaning unit, as I will want to use it for airbrushing).
• I need a few more tools: a proper bandsaw, the above mentioned sliding compound mitre saw and a pillar drill. And probably a small planer/thicknesser. I am not currently considering a table saw, as I can’t really see the use of it, but that may change.

Right now, it’s off to bed, and then we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

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.

Just a quickie, really. Work is progressing well on the new workshop, albeit not at the speed I was hoping for.

The lights are installed, and boy, they are good! Very even, very white light. Almost like the inside of a doctor’s surgery. The new windows and the new door are installed, in the end I got them with triple glazing, as it was very little extra money. They are almost completely soundproof.

On the floor, I managed to get the damp proof primer down, and one part of the workshop also had its first layer of the actual floor paint. Looks very good. However, it needs temperatures > 7 degrees and it must be dry. Since of late this wasn’t really the case, I started doing other stuff.

Over the last week I built a big cupboard on one side of the main shop area, that’s now complete (and already filling up), and I am almost done with the soundproof cabinet for the chip extractor and the compressor.

That’s all for now. I promise, next time I will have some pictures, and more details. Hopefully around the middle of March I can actually get the lathes in the shop and start turning again. Can’t wait!!!!

It’s been over 5 weeks since I last posted, and I thought everyone might enjoy a little update on the situation.

We moved into our new house on Saturday, 17/12/2017, with only the things we had in our temporary accommodation in the cottage in Kinver. On Monday the removal company arrived with all rest of our stuff, which was in storage until then. We decided to only have a few items of furniture dotted around the house and leave most of the boxes unpacked. After all, we will be making some fairly major changes to the house AND have all the rooms redecorated AND have new bathrooms AND have a new kitchen, so there’s little point in unpacking only to have to move it around again.

So for now we are essentially camping in our house. My plan always was to do as much work as possible on the workshop over the Christmas holidays (and I had 3 weeks of leave that needed taking anyway). I found out quite quickly that this was going to be slightly hampered by the fact that most suppliers I needed close down over Christmas. Luckily, Screwfix and Jewsons were open most of the time.

I already knew that I would need to rewire the workshop. Initially it only had 2 plug points and a single light switch, controlling 4 really old fluorescent tubes. So the first job was to hire a skip and rip out the entire old ceiling. Well, actually the first job that did get done was to have the roof recovered, as I though it was leaking and this was the source of the mold on the ceiling.

I hired a local company, who came around on 23/12, completed the job there and then, and that’s when the fun started. He wanted payment right away. No problem, I said, give me an invoice and I’ll pay you. “Oh, I don’t do invoices, and besides you signed the order, which serves as an invoice” he said. I said to him “that’s not an invoice or a sales order, it’s a quote and it even says that clearly on the front”. After some wrangling he sent me an email,  thinly disguised as an invoice (and a long way short of a proper invoice) and I paid him.
Over Christmas we had a bit of wind, nothing too serious and certainly not a full blown storm, and some of the new stuff promptly came off. Ever since then I’ve been battling to get the guys back to fix their handiwork. It’s now booked for Friday, and we’ll see how that goes.
Funnily enough, the roofing guy confirmed that the plywood in the roof was solid, and the mold was caused by rising damp in the walls. More on that later.

So, I ripped out the entire ceiling and used some tape to hold the insulation in place. Then I proceeded to rewire the workshop so that I would have 8 double sockets all around, and separate lighting circuits for the main room and the painting room, with all the wiring terminating at the opposite end of the workshop where the new mains supply was going to come in. Forgot to say that initially the workshop was fed from a cable that ultimately plugged into a socket in the garage, with a single 13A fuse on it. That was never going to fly, never mind the gerry rigging going on the garage.

Then new plasterboard went up onto the ceiling, this time the 12mm aluminium coated stuff. Quite a job and impossible without a second person. Made a few mistakes, which the plasterer did laugh about, but heyho, we got the job done.

Round about the same time, and whenever the temperature allowed (needed to be 5 degr Celsius or above), I started to level the floor. In the end I put about 300kg of levelling compound in, and now it is more or less flat, but not level. One end of the floor is about 2″ higher than the other, and that was just too much to fix. The levelling work OK, but probably down to my lack of experience it didn’t end up as good as it could have been, and I had to spend several hours on my knees with a belt sander to knock off the high spots.

I’ve now also found a source for new windows and doors. The original ones had wooden frames, but had not seen any maintenance over several years, and consequently the wood had rotted to the point where I could just put my finger into it without any problem. Not fixable. So now I am waiting to hear from these guys when they can install the new ones. I managed to find some windows that are left overs from another job and a halfways decent fit, but the door needed a new one made, due to its size. At the moment there’s a double door, about 1.1m wide, but it’s useless as you always have to open both sides to get in (at least when you’re my size).

I did manage to find a plasterer early on in the new year, and he skimmed the ceiling for me, and a good job he did despite my failings as a putter-upper of plasterboard. We also managed to find an electrician willing to take on the jobs in the house and the new power supply to the workshop (6mm squared with a 32A fuse on it, armoured cable straight out of the brand new distribution board in the house), and that was done on Monday this week.

Over the weekend I hired myself and airless sprayer and spraypainted the ceiling and walls with plain white masonry paint. What fun that was! It does actually work very well, but you definitely want a disposable onesie, and DO take your glasses off. Takes a bit of practice and the paint needs to be watered down about half and half. It does waste quite some paint, especially on comparable small surfaces, but the actual spraying part was extremely quick and even.

Last night I managed to install all the wall boxes for the sockets and light switches. I had to to wait for my new Makita drill to arrive. Over the previous week I’d left my old power drill in the workshop (which has no security at all), and some louts climbed over several neighbourhood fences, broke into several sheds, and nicked my drill. Idiots! The thing was nigh on 10 years old, knackered, no charger, no carry box, they even left the second battery behind.
I used the opportunity to buy a Makita drill, suitable for LXT batteries, the sames as fit onto my circular saw (and I will carry on with Makita tools, as I have had excellent experience with them so far). I may even put a board up in the neighbourhood asking the idiots to come back and collect the charger, battery and box for the old drill, saves me driving to the recycling site.

So what’s left? Tonight I will fit all the sockets and switches and ( if there’s time left) the new LED light panels. I already have in my garage two boxes with epoxy damp tolerant sealer and epoxy floor paint, which should go on over the weekend. Did I mention the dampness in the workshop? At some point it got so bad that I decided to leave a little electric fan heater running all the time, and that seems to have done the trick. Dampness on the floor has all but disappeared, and even the walls already feel drier (and that is after all the skimming and painting!).

Once the floor is painted and the new door and windows are in, I can start with the actual fitting out of the shop. But that’s for another story.