The quest for the holy grail...

So like most of you, I have a workshop space that is far too small for the amount of stuff I have. The astute amongst you will have noticed I’ve been thinning the herd a little over recent months and some of you now have some nice olde worlds machines adorning your workshops. Now that I can actually walk through the centre of the garage without tripping over a Herbert quill assembly or a Frejoth lathe bed it’s time to turn my attention to getting some sense of organisation into what currently remains...

I currently have around 28sqm to play in and have been consolidating the contents of two other larger sheds at other properties down into that space. It’s been kind of liberating to let go of some stuff but also challenging because there’s just so much of it. I imagine it’s a fairly common theme that most of you understand, so in order to keep myself honest and keep progress in a forward direction and maybe give those of you playing along at home something to amuse yourselves with I thought it might be an interesting process to document my quest for the holy grail of workshops... ORGANISATION!!!

Chapter 1..
The Great Wall.

Today I had a few hours reprieve from the dreaded ‘honey do’ list, which currently has me banishing the 80’s from out lounge room and building out the floor in the lounge room to the same level as everything else around it.. So how did I use this utopian slot of time? Well I now have order amongst the largest portion of my work holding devices. I finished up the last piece of the clamp rack in the form of the vice grip bracket and now have all things clamp in one tidy place. As a result, I now have four less milk crates on the floor... yes you read that correctly..

Any chance there’s a moderator in the house that can edit the title please and remove the text beyond the full stops please. It appears my love hate relationship with touch screen devices continues :U

Is that Unistrut that you're using for the knob end of the Vise Grips????
Nice clamp rack too by the way.:2tsup: It's great when something works out, now all YOU have to do is get in the habit of putting them back.:D
Kryn

wow. I didnt relies what that was straight away. I have to say well done,man thats impressive. What can go wrong your set now.
.your shed is shaping up.

Thanks for the likes and positive comments.

The slotted tube the vice grips are hanging in is 40x40 tube that I slotted on the mill. If anyone else is contemplating making something similar, offset the slot to one side of centre. Some makes have longer release levers than others that will foul on the tube if it’s not off centre.

No worries with me putting them away Kryn, I am very much a put it away if it has a place type person. The chaos ensues when I don’t have a place.

Hey RacingTadpole,

Great idea for a thread, thankyou. Am gonna copy your clamp rack.

My wife encouraged me to tidy my shed. Am 1/2 way there. Got some sets of drawers from officeworks at clearance prices for all my small stuff.
So made a spreadsheet to help find things - see attached - didn't take very long - for those who haven't much experience with spreadhseets they are worth a look.

ie open the attached file and hit Edit, then Find, type in reamer and it will show you which drawer the reamers are in, get a grandchild or niece or nephew to help if you want to make one, or post into the forum probably a heap of us have used spreadheets a lot and can help. Can have the spreadsheet on a Tablet or laptop or phone - saves flipping open several drawers & boxes looking for stuff. Eventually you just remember and know where stuff is.

Random Tip : To stop hooks constantly falling out of pegboards when you lift the tools off the hooks, put a tiny screw or a dob of hot glue into the hole beside the hook.

Bill

Nice job.

My "clamp rack" is on one of the 6m long roof angle iron trusses above my head, It' s at a near perfect height above my head to be able to reach to put the clamps on. . There are two spots under that truss where I need to be able to walk under so I store the shorter clamps above these spots, and the longer clamps are stored above where I can't walk.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by racingtadpole

No worries with me putting them away Kryn, I am very much a put it away if it has a place type person. The chaos ensues when I don’t have a place.

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I wish my Boss was, when he's finished with something, it gets dropped where it lands. Then he goes around asking have we seen ????
Yesterday got called in to help finish a trailer, and he's asking if I've seen the impact gun, later in the day I went outside to find it sitting in a trailer that HE was working on, along with several sockets, pop rivet gun and a cordless grinder.
He's terrible at leaving tools outside, just about need a wheelbarrow to go around to collect stuff at the end of the day.
I hang most of my clamps off the roof trusses also, just need to work out a way to stop the F clamps from falling off if/when they get knocked.
Kryn

Never thought I suffered from clamp envy before but I do now. Great rack.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by steamingbill

Random Tip : To stop hooks constantly falling out of pegboards when you lift the tools off the hooks, put a tiny screw or a dob of hot glue into the hole beside the hook.
Bill

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If your a tool hanger like me Blu-tack is the go. Easy to reposition if need be.

Tony

I used to have a piece of angle under the truss to give a flat to squeeze them up on.

Bill

Started this xls about 10 years ago, it's about 500 lines, Only problem is, I've got more tools & rearranged some cabinets & not upgrade the spreadsheet all the time.



JohnQ

Only trouble listing the cost is if SWMBO sees it!!!!!!! Good for insurance purposes though.
I've put those sticky label thingies on some of my drawers, only because I'm constantly trying to find the best convenient way of storing stuff and changing my layouts, well trying to.
Kryn

I was supposed to accompany the tribe on an interstate trip put on by the other half’s employer but as luck would have it our motley crew of bulldogs haven’t reached that evolutionary point where they can feed themselves and our house sitter wound up in hospital three hours before we were supposed to leave.. you can see my disappointment here can’t you :;

So this morning whilst surveying my fiefdom over coffee I had a realisation. There are cobwebs in my workshop that never used to be... So I set about some tidying and pondered this for a bit, surely I haven’t slowed down that much have I? (I’m not 50 yet before anyone decides to get smart :U) Middle of last year we had to put our cocker spaniel down (I’ll spare you the details, the circumstances were somewhat horrific) and since then the birds have come back. We always had large problematic populations of insects and arachnids outside, but not anymore. Since we no longer have a bird dog, the birds are back, the food chain is in play and the smarter ones have taken up refuge in my workshop... So this pondering kind of led to the next choice of task on the quest. After picking up something that was in the corner and nearly being eaten alive by one of the biggest red backs I’ve seen for a while, I decided some sealed storage was in order...

Chapter 2 (Verse 1)
It hangs in the air in the same way bricks don’t.

I have a couple of pieces of unistrut fixed to wall behind my 9 inches of Hercus. Some time ago I bolted a couple of cantilever brackets to it and stuck a piece of dead tree across them and covered it in everything from metrology equipment to tap and die sets (aka anything you use regularly on a lathe, although I’m not sure what my thinking was with the dozen ikea cutting boards). Just before Christmas I found some ex office fitment overhead cupboards for the right sort of money on evilbay, and then doubled the cost having a pallet of them trucked from Melbourne to Adelaide. Today I moved all the stuff off the lump of dead tree and banished the tree for the moment. I dragged one of the cupboards in to start to figure out how best to attach something that belongs in an office to the wall of my workshop. Now because I’m not waffling on enough I need to point out that I’m somewhat leery of office storage in a workshop, it just never seems to work, but while these cabinets are not ideal straight out of the box, they should be very workable with some minor modifications, like fitting a back to them (that was the subject of a discussion with the seller, as the pictures I was sent showed backs installed, only two of the six I bought came with backs installed).
I decided I would strip the light fitting out (mostly because junior bulldog hasn’t figured out what ‘leave it’ means yet and tried to make it cordless), fill the holes, attach a plate on the back and then use some angle iron across the unistrut to bolt the cabinet to. I’m trying to use what I have left over from other honey do jobs/projects/previous customer work to not waste time keep going to suppliers and bending the wallet more than necessary. Great plan except I didn’t have enough 3mm angle on hand so had to make do with some flat bar on the ends at the top, the flat bar with milled slots makes it look more like a design feature than me being too lazy to go to the metal supplier. Light came out easy enough, cut a plate and filled the void, even took a picture part way through. Cut a piece of ally for the back, miraculously the length is about 20mm shy of the capacity of my guillotine so I didn’t have to resort to the table saw. No pictures of that, but I’m pretty sure no one will be missing out..
My plan was to mount it with bolts through the angles into the top and bottom. That works for the top, not so much for the bottom where there’s some funky angle things going on to provide the rigidity meaning no access to where the bolts need to come through. Thought about self tapping screws in the bottom then remembered I have a pathological hatred of them and went off in search of the nutsert tool. Couldn’t find the 8mm head for it, or any 8mm inserts, used 6mm, then found the 8mm head and some inserts and realised I had no 6mm bolts left.. Now you get why we’re tramping through the forest banging coconut shells together!

And for the record, the hole in the lower bracket that’s not serving any purpose was not me misreading the tape by 100mm, I swear :roll:

Nice work. Don't y o u love it when you get time alone!

I thought i was the only person who misread tape measures by exactly 100mm!

Sorry to hear about you dog.

Simon

Sent from my SM-G970F using Tapatalk

So the lounge room now has a big tick next to it on the list with the exception of the skirting, that has a lead time because the red and green don’t keep the profile I need in the timber I want so I’ve had to order it from a specialist supplier. This earned me some workshop time :U

After hanging the first cabinet and stuffing it full of things temporarily to get them out of my way, I decided the next logical step was to shift the material that was on the unistrut between the wall of clamp and the cabinet to make way for more cabinets. I could have just moved a couple of ready made cantilever arms over and been done with it in a few minutes but when I tried it didn’t really work for me because of the bulk of the cantilevers and the encroachment into the space where I was intending to put them. I saw a statement somewhere that said when you have a welder everything becomes a bracket.. I sectioned a piece of 50mm square SHS and used up some small pieces of 25mm square to make some less intrusive cantilevers.

Attachment 384485

Not entirely happy with end result because I had to put Copco straps on the top as a measure of safety because I didn’t like how all the material sat. Most likely revisit this at some point, or put some safety chains on it like at the workshop of a previous employer.

Attachment 384486

I also short changed myself on the length, I didn’t account for the conduit on the pillar on the right. Is what it is.

So I’ve now stripped all the cantilevers off the other wall and need to procure more angle and ally sheet to put up more cabinets. That may have to wait a bit because I have no means of transporting a 4m length of angle. The steel supplier I use will only load 3.6 onto my trailer before it’s at legal overhang (the solution is coming).

In my shorter blocks of time I try to keep the sense of accomplishment up by getting a smaller job done. Since the last update I’ve ticked some of these.

The first one was creating a place for the spirit levels to live that’s not the corner of the lounge room now it’s finished. Some off cuts of 75x50 cut down further and a couple of scraps of flat bar et voila!!

Attachment 384487

The second was dispensing of the cords on some more of the AC powered tools. This may not be for everyone but for me it’s a winner. I really don’t like trying to manage cords on power tools so I fit much shorter IEC leads (kettle plugs to most people) to them and then only have to manage a couple of kettle leads.
Attachment 384488

Lastly, I made a small plastic holder for my centre punch collection in the top drawer of my tool box. Didn’t quite have the hang of the speed/feed for the cutting board it’s made of so I had to trim the whiskers that cut and re-melted themselves with a Stanley knife blade.
Happy enough with it to say I’ll probably make more for other things.

Attachment 384489

If you’re still awake.. that’s where it’s at at the moment