Setting up the workshop
Introduction
One perk of living in the countryside is that you normally have a lot of space available. By moving to my mothers childhood home (an old farm) we now also have this luxary and decided to reporpuse the garage as a workshop.
Up till now it fulfiled this job somewhat, there were pretty solid workbenches with nice hight adjustable vices, but there also was lot of chaos. Sadly we don´t have any before pictures, but to put it into perspective we drove 900 kg of scrap metal to the scrap yard, so…
(To be fair, there was no regular use in the last ~20 years, so it is understandable)
Preparing the garage
Boy, did we do a lot of cleaning. We spend three whole days, carrying all the material out of the garage, sorting it into usable tools and scrap and moved all the old shelves out.
The next step was the window. I mean it was still opening and closing, but it was an old wooden frame which also had seen better times. After meassuring and ordering a new window (and when enlarging the wall opening, because when ordering the window we gave the size of the opening, but they thought it was the window size).
As evident from the picture, the garage was also in dire need of a nice, fresh coat of paint and some holes in the wall also needed to be closed with plaster.
Fixing up the workbenches
We already had two pretty solid workbenches (~130 kg each), but the way they were set up, didn´t fit with us. On one bench the legs had been removed and its counter top was bolted to the second bench. Initially we wanted to put the two tables back to back, allowing us to access them from three sides, but in the end, we put them along one of the walls, as we ran out of space.
But for the initial setup, we needed a new set of legs for one of the benches, so we broke out the old welder (one wouldn´t dare to call it trusty) and welded up some square tubing we had laying around.
We also wanted to add some hight adjustable foots to the work benches, to make them easier to level. So we ordered a set of M10 machine foots and welded small plates with threaded holes to all the feet. After a nice paintjob, the bench nearly looks like it was built like this.
Wiring it all up
Due to the renovations we cut the power to the garage, as all of the old electronic had to be ripped out. In the end we know, that we would need a new power line to the garage, as originally it was only 230V at 16 A. As we were not so keen on digging up our driveway, our initial idea was to have a socket in the garage, where we could plug the garage in like a machine and use 64A three phase power.
After consulting our electrician, he gave as a very concerned look (like we lost our mind) and suggested, that we also just could pull some cables like a U around the whole driveway. This was a very reasonable idea, as we also needed to lay some more ethernet cables. If only we had known, how heavy 50 meters of NYM-J 5×10 mm² were. Working on the ladder was not so fun, but in the end it all went well. While at it, we also layed rougthly 120m of ethernet cable, so that every corner of the farm has internet, but that is another story.
So we finally had the cable in the garage. The electronics in the garage were pretty simple. We wanted 4x LED-Lamps, 4x 16A three phase power, 4x 16A single phase power and the small distribution box with a 32A three phase power plug for the CNC. It beeing a garage, we just used cable channels for all the wiring. We prepared all the wiring and the electricion finished it up, so that it all would be up to code.
Moving in the machines
In the end, the only machine which really gave us a headache was our CNC-machine. An old MAHO MH600T, we are still restoring. We made some good progress, but for the finishing touches we wanted to have the machine in the work shop. So getting it there was not the problem. Nothing a big forklift can´t handle, but with the ceiling being to low, the forklift could not drive into the garage, so we had to get creative, on how we would get the machine down from the two pellets…
But in the end, we are not the first people to move heavy stuff and Archimedes already said:
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes
So in the end, we took our time and slowly removed one wooden board at a time and lowerd the machine down.
The other machines (bandsaw, beltgrinder, small desktop CNC), were no problem. But currently it looks like, we found a free surface grinder, so we might have to break out our crowbar again in the near future.