The workshop

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My workshop is a slightly extended thin garage. At the start it was important to get three things right:

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• Power - separate fuse box off the ring and more sockets than you could ever imagine you need!

• Floor - for standing over time concrete is very tiring. I floated a wooden floor using loft boards and it feels warm and comfortable.

• Heating - conveniently my garage is connected by one wall to the house so there is a good deal of warmth that perculates from that side.  I do however have electric heater in there in winter - keeping the shop dry and warm is a good way of keeping fungus, woodworms etc away from the wood.  Heating it also allows me to keep a through draught even in winter which sounds wasteful in heat but is does help to keep the fine dust flowing out of the working areas.

• Lighting - there is an equation somewhere that I used to calculate how many striplights you need (again more than you would think) and also crucially where they are placed on the ceiling relative to your work surfaces so as to avoid shadows.

• Dust management. I got worried a while ago about dust so invested in various dust collection systems including a number of old vacuums. The last type proved to fill far too quickly so now I move around the dust collectors between machines. I also have an air dust collector but still feel I need to wear personal dustmasks (from Screwfix).

 

It turns out by the way that a long thin workshop is actually a very efficient way of using space as long as the bigger machines are either on casters or wheels so that they can be brought into the middle.

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I bought a morticer a good while ago but my use of it has reduced almost the point that I would be happy to sell it off to make more useful space. For such work now I use the biscuit jointer which is much easier to use and creates joints just as strong.

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When someone told me many years ago that they had six electric drills I thought at the time this was very much over the top and wasteful.  I have learnt though that a number of drills, both power and rechargeable ones are in fact quite useful so when you are working you are not constantly swapping bits around.