Last time we talked about the shop, I pointed out that the machine room floors needed to be refinished, like the bench room.

Difference in the floor between the two rooms

We thought we might be able to live with it, but after many dirty knees while working on machines trying to get them online that did not prove to be the true. The Yates American 36″ bandsaw, the radial arm saw station and the table saw island proved too big to move, so we decided to sand and finish around them. Here you can see the machine room with most of the machinery pushed into the empty space at the East end of the shop.

North wall of the shop before sanding

North West Corner Before Sanding

Table Saw Island

South East Corner

While this set back was frustrating, in the end the results definitely were worth the effort and time. Besides, we have become highly efficient at sanding and finishing floors. The entire process took three days. And here are the finished results.

Planer was pivoted out of our space on a pallet jack

Lathes Back In Place

East Side

West Side

South Side

-CB-

Machine Room Coming Together

Midstream of Machine Room Build-out

Machine room with ductwork plan

After some careful planning on paper, see “Planning the New Studio“, we massed all our machinery at the shop.

We were able to move James’ equipment out of his old shop and up to Lawrence in two trips in a 22 foot Penske truck. It went pretty seamlessly since everything was on wheels or on pallets, and I had recently found a pallet jack on Craigslist.

Don was bringing over his 8-inch jointer from his basement shop and we were able to muscle it out of his basement with four guys and some elbow grease.

I was not as lucky. Most of my machinery is 40 plus years old, cast iron and enormous. Adding that to the fact that my old shop did not have a loading dock, I needed to hire a rigger. As luck would have it, a machine I recently purchased from IRS Auctions was located at a rigger’s shop, so he agreed to bring it over and pick up all the other machines for a reasonable rate.

Enter Mike Kane of Woodworking Machinery Services and his amazing transforming truck. It basically is a 18 wheeler trailer that operates like a flat bed truck. He was easily able to unload his fork lift and move about 10,000 Lbs of machinery in a about a half an hour.

After all the machinery was at the shop, we started to move the machinery into position, bring electricity to them and hook up the dust collection system. Early on we decided to try to use the two dust collectors, a small Penn State and an Onieda, that we had rather than purchase a new/used one.

Onieda Installed With Duct Work

We built a small Stub wall to hold the Penn State dust collector, which will service the Wadkins 24-inch planer and the south wall, which has two lathes, three shapers and drops for a mobile sanding station.

Here is the run from the Onieda along the north wall that services the two jointers, the radial arm saw, and the three band-saws.

Duct Work on the North Wall

The Onieda also services the table saw island and the area that we are calling a tool corral, that houses router tables, William and Hussey molder planer, Dewalt Planer, scroll saw, and our 37-inch Performax drum sander.

Table Saw Island Coming Together

We had to raise the SawStop about 2 inches off the ground so that it would be level with the Oliver 260-D, a dual arbor sliding table saw. Here is the table saw island coming together.

Table Saw Island Nearing Completion

I have some trepidation about these dust collectors keeping up with all the machinery, but we thought we would give it a try first and then upgrade as necessary. Also we plan on eliminating the filter assembly and venting the fine particle out the shop window to improve their efficiency, being 6 floors up has some benefits. Adding blast gates to isolate entire runs, as well as at each machine, would also improve efficiency.

Time will tell if these two smaller dust collectors will be able to keep up with three people in a busy shop.

-CB-

While the wall was going up, it quickly became apparent that we needed to do something about the floors.

Anything that touched the floors came up stained a dark brown; 2×4’s, knees, tools, my oldest daughter, anything. Not so great if you are building fine furniture, although we could instantly create a 150 year old patina on a project, just by kicking it around the shop for a few minutes. A quick trip to the Home Depot rental center and we were off to the races.

I think we developed a pretty good system; a belt sander hooked up to a Oneida Dust Deputy, hooked up to a shop vac, all on a hand truck. But after looking at Oneida’s website we are not the first to come up with this system.

Here you can really see the extent of the problem. I know many of you will notice that we are sanding across the grain, but the floors have enough dips and valleys that sanding with the grain we ended up with mixed results at best.

Here are the finished results after a sealer coat, 2 coats of high gloss polyurethane (for durability), and one coat satin polyurethane (to cut down on the glare).

In this picture you will notice the darker streaks on the floor. We are not sure what caused this, but we have some theories. We think that at one time there were rows of pallet racks on the floor, and this is either where the racks were or the space between them. Either way it is really strange.

The floors are 1″ thick rock maple laid on top of 4″ thick sleepers set perpendicular to each other on top of poured concrete. One of my shop-mates, James, espoused an interesting theory that you can tell an old floor by the length of the floor boards. In a really old floor the lengths are shorter because the methods for moving the logs out of the forest were more labor intensive and therefore early lumberjacks sawed raw logs shorter to make them easier to move.

One obvious problem though is that we are going to have to refinish the machine room floor. Too bad most of the machinery is already in place.-

-CB-

Truth be told the blog is not running in real time (shocker). There is about a six month lag between what is happening here and what is really going on at the shop. Several large projects have come and gone, but I will try to bring this part of the website up to date. Also, some people have expressed interest in the process of setting up our shop.

I walked you through my thoughts for the shop and the decision to divide the shop into three rooms:the finishing room, the bench room and the machine room. We decided to use an existing office as our finishing room so that space is already built out, although some modifications will be necessary. Our insurance company is mandating that we have explosion proof lighting and a fire-proof cabinet, which we were lucky enough to find on craigslist for a mere $75 and $100, respectively. God Bless the internet. We also need to provide an exhaust fan and a filtered inlet for fresh air. In addition, we are going to build a loft above the finishing room for storage. (More on that SNAFU later.)

The first major hurdle is building the wall between the bench and machine rooms. We were able to accomplish that in a timely manner. These rolling stairs came in so handy that we decided to purchase a set from our landlord.

Rolling Stairs

Framing

Bench Room Side

Machine Room Side

We decided on painted sheetrock for the bench room side to help bounce the light around the room to brighten it up for close hand work, and we used OSB, (oriented strand board) on the machine room side to make it easier to hang hang jigs, clamps, duct work, patterns or your favorite Studley tool box poster.

At the center of the wall will be a pair of 4×8 doors on double hinges, which will be the main passage way into the machine shop. At the far end of the wall is a second 4×8 door that will be next to the lumber rack in the bench room and next to the radial arm saw/band saws in the machine room to help with work flow. The doors are oversized to make the moving of large materials (4×8 sheets of plywood) and machinery a little easier.

Now for the fun part, starting to fill the space up with machinery…

-CB-