[AT] shop cleaning

[Francis Robinson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Hall" <jthall at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: [AT] shop cleaning


 Decided yesterday
> to do some cleaning in the shop. I must say the main workbench had gotten 
> to
> be an embarassment. >
> John Hall
>


_________________________________


    I finally had to add a 16" tall "sideboard" to the back of my main bench 
to keep stuff from falling off of the back.   ;-)    My father and I used to 
joke about making a bench with a double sided top mounted on bearings and 
using a timer to rotate it 180 degrees every 24 hours. We would then have a 
pit under it that could be cleaned out with a manure loader once a year. 
;-)
    My shop had become almost useless due having too much in it. This summer 
I started moving the wood shop out to a separate 24' X 48"+ building which 
was originally built as a store and was attached to what was our house at 
that time. For many years (after the store was moved) it served as our 
family room and an office. When we moved to this much larger house it 
started filling up with stuff so we had a big yard sale and emptied most 
stuff out. I decided to put the wood shop there both for the room and 
because I can heat it easily. The layout is a natural. In spite of losing a 
lot of time to other problems this summer I have made "reasonable" progress 
in the move and will have the last of it moved before Christmas. Maybe even 
by the end of this week. A huge benefit of that move is that the wood shop 
was using A LOT of the space in the farm shop. As the wood shop moves out 
the farm shop (36' X 50') now is becoming a far more viable shop just 
because stuff is going away... I now have more room there than I just have 
to have. Machines, tools and projects that were "crammed in" now have good 
logical locations available. I am even going to have room at one end to park 
at least two or three tractors in an area that I will wall of and no longer 
try to heat (About 1/3rd of the former wood shop). Now that I am retired 
from the grain farming I find that I can remove a lot of "misc. stuff" from 
the shop and store it in no longer used grain bins. I can't claim that the 
grain bins are "organized" but I can find stuff in them and the "stuff" is 
no longer in the way in the shop. By walling off parts of the shop I will be 
able to heat it fairly easily and work in it the rest of the winter much 
better than before. As "stuff" goes away I am finding projects that I had 
even forgotten were in line. I don't recall ever looking forward to a winter 
as much as I am the rest of this winter.
    Shop cleaning can be really therapeutic...   :-)

--
"farmer"

When you reach the end of your rope
 tie a knot and hang on...

Francis Robinson
Central Indiana, USA
robinson at svs.net