Saturday, June 18, 2011

Father's day...



Spent putting tools into boxes, and taking down electric motors from machinery. The big move is going to begin on the 24th and run non-stop until the 27th. With this in mind, everything else looks like an after thought. However, I managed to brand a small purchase into a Father's day thing this morning.

I was glad to see that my eyeball and square setup for the jointer and power saws (bandsaw, tablesaw and miter saw) were all very much within 0.1 degree.

That's all for me for now. I plan to shop for bamboo flooring again tomorrow. With a bit of self deception, I could convince myself that working with  bamboo will dull my mitersaw blade enough to finally buy a better one when I get back to furniture making.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

A computer Scientist designing a woodshop

Now that my shop is partially in boxes and crates, there is nothing fun left to do until the move is done... and will begin only in 12 days. With nothing better to do than spend time on the laptop, here is a workflow diagram that I came up with.



White nodes are things that I already have, gray nodes are things that I'll add to the new shop. An arrow indicates that I commonly go from one place to the other. The blue node represents the Dust collector (the arrow direction is meaningless).  The point of this diagram is to identify the "hub" nodes and the relationship between stations to minimize movement around stuff with material in my hands.  Since I'm taking over a big workshop, I've got a lot of space to deal with and thus I have the option of designing rather than just making it fit. The result is a bit messy, but there is some things that can be said.

Findings

The main hub of the shop is the project parts shelf. I've wanted to have a dedicated spot to store project components. It is fairly clear that these shelves are common to the milling and joinery equipment. As a result: it will be in the middle of things, even more than the bench and tablesaw.  The second hub is unsurprisingly the bench. The tablesaw is adjacent to the bench (acting as an outfeed anyway).

To minimize the dust collector ducting, I'll keep the bandsaw, drill press and router table near the tablesaw in-floor duct and cluster the other tools (planer, miter) near the collector beside the lumber/milling area.

The assembly area needs only to be adjacent to the tablesaw/parts shelf and the finish shelves and sink, at the other end of the room.