Despite having a enormous amount of room for storage (the other half of our side of the floor is empty) we are going to start the build out before moving in most of the machinery. Early on we decided that we would divide the space into two rooms, really three if you count the finish room. I liked the set up at North Bennet Street School where there was a bench room for close hand work and a separate machine room for all the noisy/dusty work. Besides being a fairly logical way to divide the shop, I think it will be a healthier way to work. (Who wants to wear a respirator and hearing protectors all day.)

My youngest daughter Grace showing off the latest Spring fashion

Before any actual building gets started, I took the time to create a floor plan on Photo Shop to figure out machine configuration. I find Photo Shop easy to use for this type of activity because I could create layers for each machine and move them around on the screen and look at things like in-feed, out-feed, and work flow. Here are the plans for the machine room and bench room.

Machine room with ductwork plan

Bench and finishing rooms

So first thing up is a wall dividing the space in half with two doorways: one that is a full 8 ft across for moving sheet goods and another that is only 4 ft across that will be closer to the lumber racks. While we are working on that, our electrician set to work with our layout and machine list to wire our shop. More about the construction in another blog.

-CB-

Tags: shop planning

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Shop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.