Shop adjustments

Containing and collecting dust at the source has been growing on me and I finally made some shop adjustments to reflect this and some workflow adjustments that were necessary for some upgrades coming along the way.

My shop space has always pretty much been the one car garage in the basement and since then grew a little over this space.  I roughly have about 120 square feet to work with in the garage space but over time, I expanded in the mechanical room just beside the garage, serving as the entryway to the house.

I have now separated the hand tool and power tools operations into these 2 rooms that are a door step away, but still 2 distinct rooms and this is important for the shop organisation.

So here is my strategy for after these shop adjustments :

• Keep the most dust offending tools, i.e. mainly power tools in the garage space where all the dust collection is
  • By having my workbench out-of-the-way, this opens up a pretty nice chunk of floor space
  • This will permit me to create some island of work based on the tasks at hand and eventually prepare for redoing the dust collection in the shop. More on that later.
  • Some storage will evolve to something different or will change position as the grouping will happen through time.
• Have the mechanical room serve up for the hand tools operations where the requirements for finer dust/chips collection is less of an issue.
  • I've moved my Roubo workbench in this room, which is closer to the wall cabinet that already carried most of my hand tools
  • Not to say that there is no dust produced, it can be somewhat controlled, somewhat less in quantity then the tools in the other room.  This type of dust can mainly be picked up with a broom and for smaller parts, regular pass of the shop vac should do the trick

This separation does not mean that a tools cannot cross to the other side, but should pretty much be limited.  For sure, layout tools are probably the only exception that they will cross on a pretty regular basis.Now there will be a few changes that will come up pretty soon, like redoing my hand tool cabinet and redoing some areas in the power tool side to.