New Shop in the Works

[poolhound]

How do you do it? Is the rod stiff enough to hammer in?

Yes but I didnt want to risk damaging it by just using brute force, here is what I did.

1. Loosened the topsoil and gave myself an approx 6-10" head start by digging a small hole.
2. drilled a 1/2" hole with an 18" masonry bit
3. filled the hole and depression with water and repeated a few times.
4. took a 1/2" 6' pipe and began plunging it in and out of the hole, filing the hole with water periodically (poured down the pipe). I happened to have a piece of EMT conduit lying around but cast iron would probably be a better choice as it has more 'heft'
5. once I had more resistance I placed a cast iron cap over the end of the pipe and used a small hand sledge hammer to continue to 'tap' it in.
6. Once that hole was made i placed the ground rod in the hole and then using the same technique only had to get it approx another foot in.

Given the various setbacks I have had hit me in the back of the head during this project I was pleasantly suprised at how easy this one was to deal with.

[atgcpaul]

BTW sinking an 8 foot copper grounding rod into the ground was much easier than anticipated (Phew ).

How do you do it? Is the rod stiff enough to hammer in?

[poolhound]

Got the subpanel properly grounded this weekend and the walls are painted and the floor just needs a couple more coats. Next weekend I can start moving in tools!!

BTW sinking an 8 foot copper grounding rod into the ground was much easier than anticipated (Phew ). Doing that and adding the ground bar to the subpanel and separating all the grounds & neutrals took less than 2 hours and the parts were only about $20 so all in all not a terrible extra job. The end result is a safe electrical system in the shop which is what one would want.

[JoeyGee]

I have been limping along with one outlet myself for almost 8 years now. It sucks, big time. Putting in a subpanel has been at the top of my shop list for a long time. Of course that list is at the bottom of several other lists...

[poolhound]

Dang Jim, one 20A outlet how do you manage with just that one? When I rewired my garage I put in a subpanel with 4 20A circuits each wired to 2 different locations giving me 8 double outlets and in most cases I was pretty close to one of 3 circuits no matter where I was.

The new shop is probably overkill as I now have 6 20A circuits plus one 240V outlet for the AC/heater unit. The original building had 3 20A (+the 240V). But they weren't all in the places I wanted so the only way to do that was to add 3 new circuits. For example I have run a dedicated circuit to the location the DC will be located as that will always be on its own and I wanted power in the middle of the room so ran another dedicated circuit to a box in the floor for the TS and Router.

We stay pretty warm most of the time here in SC too. No heat planned for my new shop. It is in some ways further along than yours, Jon, and in some ways less. No DC piping so far but it has a garage door on one end and a regular door on the other end, lights, and one 20A outlet. I'm using it but with no storage (or walls) it is a mess. I'm concentrating on getting some rooms finished in the house at the moment. But it's still nice to have the tools here and a chance to use them.

Jim

[JimD]

We stay pretty warm most of the time here in SC too. No heat planned for my new shop. It is in some ways further along than yours, Jon, and in some ways less. No DC piping so far but it has a garage door on one end and a regular door on the other end, lights, and one 20A outlet. I'm using it but with no storage (or walls) it is a mess. I'm concentrating on getting some rooms finished in the house at the moment. But it's still nice to have the tools here and a chance to use them.

I have no experience with a Super Dust Deputy but I am tentatively planning to get one based upon the performance of my Dust Deputy on my shop vacumn. I have a little 6 gallon rigid shop vac. I added a hepa filter to it. That stopped it from blowing fine dust all over but the filter plugged rapidly. So I added the dust deputy. No more problem with filter clogging. Even fine sanding dust and drywall dust goes into the bucket beneath the dust deputy, not into the vacumn. I haven't had to clean the filter or empty the vacumn yet and I've dumped the 5 gallon bucket several times. I have a thien pre-filter for my DC and I like it but it is nowhere near as effective on the small stuff. I'm sure a little of the fine dust actually makes it to the vacumn but it can't be much or I would be seeing some when I check.

Jim

[poolhound]

I agree, I'm jealous of the shop, too, but more jealous of the Phoenix "winter".

Believe it or not it had been freezing here the last week yes actually below 32 degrees first thing in the morning although it would warm up to 50-60 later. We actually had snow on new years eve at the slightly higher elevations.

Although we only got light rain on NYE, this picture is from only a few miles north of me.



Of course give it a few weeks and we will be nice and warm again

[poolhound]

Looks great Jon, I am so jealous. Working in my garage/shop with to cars that need to be bought in most of the time in the winter is getting old.

Having been doing the same as you for the last umpteen years I am very excited to get my own space. I can say that before I decided to renovate the existing structure I did look at pulling it down and using some prefab building structure. Assuming you can put in a slab or a basic foundation they can be pretty reasonable in comparison to a new custom build.

[JoeyGee]

I agree, I'm jealous of the shop, too, but more jealous of the Phoenix "winter".

[bigstick509]

Looks great Jon, I am so jealous. Working in my garage/shop with to cars that need to be bought in most of the time in the winter is getting old.

[poolhound]

Nearly There

Over the holiday break I have made a lot of progress and am nearly at the 'fun' part. I managed to complete a number of major jobs although the all had challenges I did not expect.

• I ran some ducting under the floor to get DC to where my tablesaw/router will be located.
  
• Ripped out the old door and installed a new one. I cant tell you what a pleasure it is to have a door that opens and closes properly. This was hampered by the fact that the threshold was rotten and I had to cut out and repair a good check of it.
  
• Installed 3 new 20A circuits including a box in the floor next to the table saw. One emerges on the exterior for where I will next build on the room that will house the dust collector.
  
• Got all the flooring back down and replaced two sections near the door that had rotted due to the door issues.
  
• All wall panels replaced
  
• All remnants of old wall paper removed.
  

I have the wall and floor paint ready to go but it seems I was handed one more 'GOTCHA' as I completed the wiring today. When I went to wire in the 3 new circuits into the subpanel I thought it was odd that all the neutral and ground wires were connected together in the same bar. When I checked I confirmed that in a subpanel there should be a separate ground bar and in fact it should also have its own ground point which should be one of those 8ft copper rods. So now I need to install this and add a separate ground bar bonded to the box. Its not that tough or expensive but its yet another job that keeps me from getting tools in there. As there will be a lot of large metal tools connected I guess I would rather not have them go live on me

I hope my next pics will be of a nice newly painted shop with at least a couple of tools in there...

[poolhound]

Spent much of this Thanksgiving weekend cutting and planing out the bows in the flooring joists. In some the bow was so extreme I had to remove 1.75" in the middle of the 2x6. I ended up strengthening them all by laminating a pair of 3/4 ply pieces to each side.

The floor itself went back in around 5pm this afternoon although its not yet fixed down as I need to run power and possibly the DC piping underneath. I am essentially back to where I started except now the building and floor is both square and flat (give or take and 1/16-1/8 here or there).

I can wholeheartedly say that I (and my back) gives great thanks that this part is now over.

[capncarl]

The dust that gets by my Thein is face powder fine dust that is coming off my drum sander and sanding at the downdraft table. When this dust gets airborne it looks like fog in the air, some of it is actually going through the 1 micron bag. I am satisfied with the chip collection and saw dust with the Thein, and do not expect that a cyclone would catch these chips and saw dust any better. I believe that a Thein separator or a cyclone would have the same poor performance catching airborne dust.
This set up with the Thein before the fan keeps the fan clean. I cut a lot of antique heart pine and before installing the Thein separator and the pine dust and chips created a mess in the fan chamber and on the blades.
To improve this dust collection would require more fan capacity/horsepower and larger piping.
If I could only keep this pine resin from clogging my sand paper and caking up on the saw blades.
capncarl

[atgcpaul]

Thein separator performance? In 5 months of lots of use for me I have emptied the chip can 7-8 times and not emptied the dust bag any. The dust bag appears to have 10 gallons of pure dust. I occasonaly beat on the dust bag just to see what falls out into the plastic bag, quite a bit does fall out. I've actually filled up a 4'x4'x2' compost bin with wood chips.
capncarl

If I read this right, the Thein separator really isn't doing a good job for you because most of the dust should be staying in your can and not getting to the filter/bag side, right?

I have the stock HF DC with the Wynn filter and the Thein baffle installed in the ring that separates the filter from the bag/can below. It's hard to say if the Thein baffle is keeping the dust out of the filter as much as I would like.

I was considering changing to a setup like yours or the super dust deputy. I have the little dust deputy for my shopvac and it's awesome--especially for cleaning out ash from my Big Green Egg.

[Bill in Buena Park]

Regarding Thien separator performance - about 1 inch of fine powder makes it past the separator into the bottom bag for every 2 trashcans worth of chips/dust. I'm using this remodel of the HF 2HP DC. Since this photo, I've replaced the stock filter bag and lower plastic bag with two 1 micron bags, and its working well.