Work Space

Here is where my projects usually start to break down.  Thinking, researching, laying out designs on paper - I could do that forever.  One problem I consistently have is that, once I have the conceptual part of the project done, the rest (as in, actually building) is just "details".

One reason this happens is that I have never had very good space to work in.  I had access to a machine shop in college, but since graduating I've been living in apartments with very little space.  Once I start wondering, Where am I going to build this?  How am I going to set up a work space? I tend to get discouraged.  After all, to have a successful project I need to have a workshop, and a bench, a vise, expensive tools,...  And it would take so much effort to get these things set up.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  We live in a triple-decker apartment now, and one of the benefits of the apartment is some basement storage space.  The main room of the basement is split down the middle by a partition, and we have one half of that room to ourselves.  It's been filthy and cluttered since the day I moved in - the landlord has been keeping old building materials in our space, and previous tenants left whatever they didn't want when they moved out.  I only had a handful of boxes and a bike that I wanted to keep in the basement, so I never bothered to clean.

It finally got bad enough that my girlfriend insisted we at least sweep the floor.  I bought a broom and a shelving unit, we threw out all the old boxes and other crap that had accumulated, and we reorganized the rest of it.

There's a lot of space down there!  And power outlets that I didn't know existed!  This is when I decided I could actually have a workshop.  And even though I decided to start the bike project earlier than this afternoon of cleaning, I was planning on working outside and hoping that I'd finish before the summer ended.

One last challenge existed: there's almost no light in the basement.  Our whole side of the basement is lit by a single light bulb with a switch upstairs in the kitchen.  This weekend, then, we made our way to Home Depot and bought a bunch of shop lights.  I got several different types - a couple of "cage" style lamps, a clip light with a metal reflector, and a halogen shop light - and strung them up all over the basement.  The cables are draped between the exposed beams and over water pipes, but it seems like there's enough light down there to work, for surprisingly little money - the cage lights only cost about five dollars each!

The basement is small but usable.

I may discover I need more lighting as I get my hands dirty, but for now the change is so dramatic that it's like, well... night and day.

If you need lights, also remember some extension cords and power strips.  I bought one of each and probably needed at least one extension cord per light.  Right now they're mostly clustered around the power outlet.

So, now there's some space that's been swept, lit, and ready to go.  I needed a surface to work on, though.  I bought a Black and Decker portable work bench (this one, actually) before cleaning out the basement, figuring that I would need to carry it outside every time I wanted to work.  I think it will be especially useful for working on tubing because the two halves of the benchtop split apart to work as a vise and the bench includes some pegs that fit into the tabletop that are shaped to hold tubes.  I should be able to hold jigs in between the two halves of the tabletop and tubing in the pegs.

I'll take some pictures and add them here to show the workspace; in the meantime, I need some tools.