New Arrivals!!

I just returned this morning from a 4 day trip out to the coast and down to Seattle. As mentioned in my last post, one of the purposes of this trip was to stop in Bellingham and pick up a cyclone dust collector from Grizzly. I also bought a drill press, which was half pre-meditated and half impulse. I had thought that perhaps I would buy a drill press but ended up getting a larger machine than I had intended. Damn the up-sell!



I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the incredible work of one particular branch of government employees. This crack squad of elite super agents are working hard every day to keep our great country free of the horrible threat that foreign woodworking machinery poses. Yup, the border guards. I'll spare the long winded story of this particular US/Canada border crossing, but let us just ponder: where the hell do they find these people?



Because I'm not certain where I'm going to set up the dust collector, I didn't do anything other than unload it from my truck. I did however take a half hour after work to assemble the drill press. For $500 it's a nice machine. There's all the standard Taiwanese-made trademarks: rough edges and some sticky moving components, but I'm sure an hour of alignment and adjustment and she'll be running like a top. It's a big chunk of fudge too! It weighs 330 lbs and it took every ounce of might I had to lift the head onto the pillar. I managed to get it all buttoned up without wrecking anything or dropping it though and she's ready to hawg some holes!

I'm looking at the picture of the drill press above and thinking about shop space. Hmmm... I've just recently bought a 20 acre acreage and have been up to my butt in renovations on the 110 year old house. All the while I've been planning on converting the little 16'x16' garage into a shop. It's insulated and has a little woodstove so it seemed like the natural choice to move my equipment and bench into. I'm not so sure now though. While shopping around for kitchen cabinets I decided that rather than pay the approximately $10,000 for modular cabinets of questionable quality I would invest half that into my woodworking shop and build them myself. The obvious downfall is it's one more thing to add to the ever-expanding list of crap I have to get done before I move in, but I get some machinery and nicer cabinets in the long run. My first purchase was a rebuilt 20" Davis and Wells bandsaw. After a couple weeks of delays I've just received word that it was loaded on the truck this afternoon and I should see it this upcoming weekend. The dust collector and drill press were my next purchases and the only other equipment on the list is a larger router to put in my router table. As I've been adding machines into the garage however, it's starting to look smaller and more cramped. And there's a bandsaw yet to come! One of the numerous outbuildings at my place is a huge old barn which has a 55'x15' lean-to on each side with a hay loft above. One lean-to is completely full of junk but the other looks like it housed a pig trough at one point and is essentially empty. Maybe that should be my shop?? The lack of a cement pad, while initially a turn-off, would allow me to run pressure treated floor joists and OSB flooring. It would be easier on the back and legs and would give space to run all the dust collection and wiring below, reducing clutter. It's also large enough that I could have a woodworking room and a separate metalworking room for my lathe and milling machine and still have room to have the dust collector and compressor in a third room. Mo' money though. I don't know how long I'll be at this place and maybe setting something up that's more temporary is a better idea? I dunno...