July 25, 2001 - While the building is complete, there is still a lot of work to be done to make it a 'working shop'.... Here are some of the things I have been doing this month.
I made the layout table from a salvaged computer table. I have not yet found a source for the vinyl covering as is used on a drafting table..... For now I just covered the board with white tile board. It looks good but is too slippery. The edge is finished with aluminum strip.
At the Salisbury hamfest a guy was selling this very high quality task light you see here. It has both a round flourescent tube and a 75W. light bulb. At $10 it was a super bargan!.
The five drawer file cabinet was free... I did have to patch several deep dents in one side and then paint the whole thing. But for a full suspension, heavy duty cabinet it was worth the effort.
I'm starting to put together a workstation PC. I've been agonizing over what kind of hot rod box to get.... In the mean time I found a guy at the local fleamarket that had a generic box for $20... It had an AMD 133Mhz. CPU and 3.3Gig. HD and 32 Meg. RAM... It needed a CD-ROM and modem which I already have in my old 486 plus the board would take one of the 8Meg. RAM 's to bump the machine to 40Meg.. The next day there was an ad in the paper for a Visioneer 7600 USB port flat bed scanner for $20 (after rebates) This PC did not have a USB port so I shelled out $30 for a 2 port PCI card. The next weekend another guy at the fleamarket had three APC 450 watt UPS units for $20 each... So I bought one of those.... The 17" Acer 76i monitor was given to me (dead) by a friend and I fixed it.... Finally I went out and bought 100' of CAT5 cable to create a hard wired LAN to my machine in the bedroom.... So now the pressure is off me for a little while on buying a new box.
I could not install a conventional sewage line for my wash sink.... Since I would only be creating 200 to 300 gallons of 'gray water' each year, I decided to have the sink drain into a sump made from a polyethelyene drum. A sump pump sends the gray water out thru a 3/4" line. I used PEX tubing for this job which is supposed to be freeze resistant. But just to be sure, I insulated the tubing anyway.
I will install a freeze cut-off switch in the sump to protect the pump and a float switch hooked to an indicator above the sink to tell me if the sump is too full.
Hot water comes from a 2 1/2 gallon unit installed under the sink.
The picture above illustrates one of the "special joys" of living in a Southern house 50 years old. They have no basement and everything is installed in a crawl space. Most areas have clearances of less than 24" from the dirt to the floor joists. So it is not really a crawl space but a "slither" space.
Tapping into old copper pipe is a real challenge. Getting all the water out to sweat joints was a DOG! The best way I could figure out to make it work is to connect up a wet/dry vacuum cleaner to a spigot and let it suck water out of the pipes.....
I laid a 1" PVC conduit line in the trench to bring over lines for the telephone, PC LAN, alarm system, an audio line and cable TV. (I don't expect to be watching TV out there but I will need it when fixing TV's out there.)
BELOW: Ron Lawrence helped me to bring in my mill/drill which had to be taken in pieces since the whole thing weighs about 770 lbs. I mounted my little Atlas 6" lathe
on the work bench.... I got the bright idea to mount the lathe on slides so that I can have more table space when the lathe is not in use.
This shows how the lathe slides out for use.
The building is finished but I needed to connect services to the house. Nothing in my life is ever easy..... To rent a back hoe and dig the trench would have killed my pecan tree. I had to dig the 27' by hand to get around the roots.
