Kicking Off This Forum...

What is your Shop Space?


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Here's a picture of my shop before we poured the floor, coal fired hot water heat is the way to go in this country, the heat stabilizes the sub strata and prevents frost heave.

I set up my shop just like you did. I sized the boiler large enough that I can use it to heat the house as well, just piped the hot water across the yard to the house and run it through the existing furnace via a heat exchange coil. I have to check the boiler every other day to refill and empty the ash. It works out nicely keeping the dust and ash out of the house. Eugene do you use anthracite coal? What is the brand of boiler you use?
 
We have low sulfur sub-bituminous coal here, note the name of our town, my boiler is made by Coalman, in Winkler Manatoba, and it's not really a boiler as it operates at atmospheric pressure. They were great people to work with, I sent them a simple drawing of my floor plan and they sent me back a schematic for the placement of the Pex tubing. When we were pouring the floor I ran water through the tubing so it wouldn't float and we had a 15 degree temprature difference between inlet and outlet. It is dirty, and a lot of work to maintain, but it's cheap and very reliable, I fueled and ashed Friday and will fuel and ash tomorrow morning.
 
I purpose built a separate garage/workshop building next to the house and connected with a breezeway. The structure is 26' wide x 40' deep and provides about 1000 S.F. of usable shop / garage area at ground level, with an additional 14' x 39' x 8' high space on the 2nd floor. The ground level area is 11' high and is fully insulated, heated and air conditioned. A 200 amp panel was installed on a separate metered service.
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Jealous. Very nice setup.
 
Similar to an earlier poster, my shop is the basement. It is a house I designed with input from my better half. Kinda' like a raised ranch. Solar, so my 'pipe organ' or 'still' if you prefer is along one wall of the shop. Radiant water heated floor since I was tired of flopping around on cold concrete of previous raised ranch houses. She gave me heck about designing the shop around the plan view of the experimental plane we built. 1400 sq ft shop with garage door on one end.
 
I have a 30'x60' metal building in my back yard It is my wood and metal shop in the footprint of my building I have a 10'x15' office and bathroom combo and a 10'x15' covered storage area so my actual shop space if 30'x50' I had it built by a local company. I did the electrical and plumbing work inside myself. shop was built to county specs I was only allowed so big. its been a real good work space it filled up so easily but cleans up so hard bill
 
Starting a dedicated forum for hobby workshops is a great idea. I've recently built my workshop and I'm still looking for the best way to finish the inside, choose the final layout, what best kind of sink to use etc.

I recently moved to a property that allowed me to build pretty much anything I want as long as it is no bigger than 35 square meters or wider than 4.8m (that's around 370 square feet and no more than about 15 ft wide).

The building on the photo below is the result. It is 20m from my house and now that we're in a middle of winter I wish I thought about some sort of covered walkway like one of the posters above did :)

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It is still being built on the photo below. Currently the weather is quite bad (mist with the sun behind the building) that a photo would not come out properly. The size is 4.8x7m and it is so tall so I can have an upper floor over the front half of it. There is also large garage-style sliding door on the other side and 1.6m deck I'll build shelves for storing raw materials on the back. This is why the roof extends behind the back of the building. It is insulated and still not fully painted on the outside.

If I could do things differently I would choose a contractor who knew what he was doing... As I ended up trusting a guy who was building it and I only started checking his construction techniques when it was too late. There are no dangerous issues with the construction, but one of the things that should be done differently is the way it was insulated.I now have water condensation issues due to inadequate venting between the outside membrane and the cladding so I'll be adding plastic vents etc. Also the bits of the wall at the very bottom were lacking a way to prevent water ingress there when it rains and there is high wind at the same time. Basically it is now over 3 months since it was "finished" and despite having to put in a lot of work I still have to deal with few small issues.

Regardless of the above I enjoy it a lot. I have a 2ton WMW (Heckert) FW220 milling machine there and other smaller machines and tools I could never fit in my previous shed-shop you can see a bit of in the background (it is 3x4m).

I have 3 phase power here (40 amps each phase or 28kW as it is described by the electric company). Although I'm a programmer by trade I have a background in electrics so I wired it and built a panel myself. I have each 3 phase machine on own circuit breakers. Every 3 phase wire being 4sq mm or 11awg wire so no longer I have to deal with a voltage drop that would switch off a plasma cutter when cutting half inch plate (this its max).

I have put in pipes for water, sewage and cooling water loop from my rainwater tank, but I had no time to hook them up yet.

If people are interested in how I have it set up I'll post more photos.

It is cool to be able to see other people's construction and compare.
 
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I have a split personality. :anon: Mechanical work, welding and woodworking in the unheated garage. 24x48 and too dang small.

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Mini lathe, electronics, model building and reloading in the (heated) basement.
 
I built my house/shop 9 years ago. Technically, it is a house with attached garage.... All the lower level is my shop, 26' x 36' with 10' 6" ceilings. Upstairs is my living quarters with a very comfortable one bedroom house, with just a little less square footage than the shop. There is no 3 phase power running by on my road, so I make do with a couple of RPC's.

Here's a couple of pics...

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I have to "thin the herd" ... :)

Brian
 
I bought a house in June and it has a 1700 square foot shop. It only had 70 amps of power taken from the house and I just yesterday completed a 400 amp upgrade. The upgrade was so much more work that I'd anticipated. Apparently we do things differently than the nation code says. I sent pics to the inspector and I'm glad I did. Had to make a couple of changes but I passed with flying colors.

Now both the house and shop have 200 amps each. I'm going to install a mini split from Mr Cool. It's a DYI installation unit. I have no heat now at all and it's getting chilly in there. My mini split came in yesterday and I'd like to start installing it, but I got a bunch of work in from some pesky customers of mine, and unfortunately work comes before play time with my new project :grin:

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My shop is 20'x30'x8' ceiling. 10" pitch so I have a loft area. I am a retired carpenter so building a shop was easy. The floor is 12" engineered joists on 16" centers with 3/4" plywood sheathing for a subfloor. 1/4" luan plywood with vinyl tiles over subfloor. This crawl space construction with concrete Sono Tube piers. Ceiling joists are 10" engineered joists with 3/4" plywood sheathing. Blue flame natural gas heater, 30,000 BTU heats the shop comfortably. Added a 10,000 BTU window air conditioner this year.
I wanted a 12,000 BTU AC but this one was brand new still in the box for $100.00. The fellow told me he decided to sell the house and did not want to ship the AC to Idaho from NJ. I sheathed the walls with 7/16" OSB, inside and outside. Inside I screwed the smooth face to the studs. I did not paint the walls, like the rustic look and have lots of double hung windows which I made.
Only change I would make is eliminating the pull down attic door and installing exterior stairs. The shop started out as a wood shop, I started machining about 12/15 years ago.
I recall spending $9000.00 on materials in 1997 ( not positive of the date). This did not include the heater or AC and vinyl tile.
I think I paid $6.00 or less for OSB sheathing. 1/2" plywood on the roof with asphalt shingles.
mike
 
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