Oye, this shop.

[atgcpaul]

We had near 80deg weather yesterday so the whole family was outside. Wife was washing the dogs and kids were making mud pies. I got to cleaning the garage. We all spent the evening in DC looking at the remaining cherry blossoms.

This morning my wife asks me if I knew the garage side door was open--that's the only way in or out except for the actual garage doors. I checked inside for anything that might be amiss, but I guess I just forgot to push the door closed. Nothing missing.

I joked when I came back inside that any potential thieves would have seen the mess and turned right back around---too much work.

I'm feeling like those hypothetical thieves now. Even with one less tool (planer) and hopefully a few less, I'm wondering how I ever fit anything in this (2 car) garage and how I ever manage to produce anything in here.

Back to cleaning.

[cwsmith]

Messy shop? Hey, I think if you're going to be using it.... it's tough to keep it neat and clean. It's like I used t tell my boss, if you want work done and things accomplished then your office ought to look like it's productive and not just for show.

Creative minds are messy minds,

CWS

[leehljp]

My dad left me some tools when he passed on; I purchased some other tools such as a table saw, thickness planer, miter saw and other things to work on the house and my daughters houses when I was home on vacation from Japan. THEN when I moved back home from Japan, and brought all my tools back, it was so crowded that I didn't have room to do anything. Last year, I gave away a BT3000, a 12inch miter saw and a bunch of duplicate tools to son in laws. Wow, what a difference it makes to be able to move around. Still not enough room to do work in there with large pieces of wood.

[atgcpaul]

Last night after putting the kids to bed, I diverged from my usual routine of couch surfing and headed back into the shop for an hour. Lots more sweeping (routers and lathes should get their own rooms!) and moving stuff from here to there. I moved the 8" grinder to the free side of my flip cart. I needed a 16" x 22" board to mount the grinder on to but my TS was so cluttered, I had to resort to using my tracksaw.

I had a largish kids armoire (4' tall x 2' square) that I stopped working on over 2 years ago taking up space. I hand DTed it together. My wife said I should repurpose it into her bar cabinet, but I just wasn't seeing it. This weekend, I cut the corners apart with my circular saw. Man, did that open up space! It was kind of liberating, too.

Now if I could just get someone to buy a 30gallon air compressor and RAS, I'd have a bunch more space!

Lee, do you remember how much all the tools (and what tools) weighed when you shipped them back from Japan? I'm in a similar situation. Within the next few months most of my tools will be packed up (by someone else--no choice, that's the rules) and stored long term. We are allowed 17,600 lbs for EVERYTHING. That's the combined weight of stuff that gets stored and stuff that we ship overseas for our household goods. I'm a little worried. I've been taking weekly trips to dump, and inside the house, I've been burning all my CDs and DVDs to my computer so we can just give them away instead of taking them with us.

[atgcpaul]

Creative minds are messy minds,

I try to tell myself that but I'm starting to lose that argument--with myself!

Years ago, my wife gave me a framed Pigpen (from Peanuts) cartoon for my desk at work. I was actually going to take a picture of it and post it here..but I can't find it under my pile of stuff!

At work, the group I manage physically manages over 1/2 million samples and we are preparing over 2 million sample wells annually. However, I have the benefit of using automation and databases to keep it all straight. Maybe I need a robotic workshop.

[cwsmith]

Paul,

I'm not a messy person, but I do set my priorities for getting things done by deadline, over trying to make everything neat and orderly. Having space to do things has always been a challenge and there have been times that I've found myself so frustrated with that lack of space that I'm almost immobilized by it. It is at those times that I find it necessary to step back and simply take a breath and do what I can to get 'my ship' in order.

Unfortunately, I'm a 'loner', and in very few cases have I ever had anyone to work with or assist, so it falls to me to get over whatever the hurtles might be. My wife on the other hand is a total neat freak, but her logic and organization patterns are completely outside my understanding at times. She once took it upon herself to organize my shop area.... ****, but it was weeks before I could find stuff.

At work, my office would be various piles of folders, disks, rolls of illustrations, etc. and yet, for the most part I knew where just about everything was. I'd occasionally get an engineer who'd step in and ask for this or that and I'd ask him to step outside and I'd get whatever it was... I can't deal with someone looking over my shoulder! Then I'd find what he needed within just a couple of minutes and we'd all be happy... but that would never be the case if he was going to stand there and watch me search as my mind gets short-circuited for some bizarre reason. That is pretty much the case here in my little basement shop. I'll find it, but not if I feel under pressure. (I once had supervisor ask how I could ever find anything in those piles of paper... I replied it was easy... once a month I spill and cup of coffee and every quarter I make it a cherry soda... I just search between the stains!"... he commented something about being a "smart a$$",)

I am a big fan of databases, often designing my own. I used to use Paradox and for the last couple of decades am stuck with MS Access. For work I designed a database for more than 4,000 employees' records to be used across multiple departments, and I took API-618 (American Petroleum Institute) process compressor specifications and built a database around all 19 pages of it. With that I could look back across more than 50 years of compressor records within just a matter of minutes and distribute to anywhere in the world a history list meeting whatever criteria that might be requested: Models, cylinder size, HP, valve type, gas application, and environment under which the process took place; dozens of category fields, all searchable. That took me more than two years to design and enter the historical data, but it worked perfectly.

I built a small database for my larger tool purchases and even for our Ham Radio test operations when we were doing that a few years ago.

But, find a screwdriver? That is still a perplexing problem.... and where exactly is that phone number I wrote down this morning?

CWS