Hey Keith, I tried to comb through the thread, I know you mentioned the shop is 30x40 but what are the door sizes? Now having used it more as a shop do you like have a big door and a smaller door? or would you have done 2 same sized doors?
I am in planning for a 30x32 and trying to consider door options.
Thanks!
Wes
Nicely timed question, I was going to post an update soon.
The small door is an 8' and the big one is 16'. Two 12' doors doesn't make much sense, so I think this is a good configuration. The only other option would probably be 3 8' doors. I haven't been using the 8' side much, that's turned into more of a long term parking area as I work in and out of the big door. We'll see if that changes much in the final setup. During the work so far, I've been using the 16' door a lot to bring in supplies because it's easy to walk between the two cars without a pillar there. So l like the configuration.
With the shop mostly done, I've turned my attention to some delayed work on the house. There are still parts that need to be sorted inside the shop, but it's a workable area. For example, on Wednesday I had to cut down a sheet of 4x8 plywood then do some routing to finish the edges on a shelf. Had loads of room to do that with everything in its place. I'm also doing work on the exterior, more to come there in a day or two.
Work time! A coworker is building a shop of his own, and had some clean fill to get rid of. So I provided a truck to move the skid steer and was rewarded with four dump trailers of dirt. I borrowed the little tractor to make a parking pad or maybe a future home for a shipping container beside the shop.
Then said coworker decided to get rid of his 10x8 metal shed for the price of “make it go away by Thursday”. I grabbed the dump trailer and a couple of buddies and we carried it home.
Voila, new storage. I’ll get a couple of trailer loads of gravel for the area in front and it’ll probably be where I park the truck. It’s good to have a wife that works for a material supply company! This shot gives you an idea of how much I had to fill in.
Those Miata, Cadillac and Land Rover parts will go into the shed once I get some shelves in there.
Dump trailers are handy for other things. I think we’ve trucked away 10 loads of tumbleweed. These are the ones that were behind the cars.
You don't enjoy burning the tumbleweeds in a fit of smoky, greasy, highly allergenic fire?
God I hate those things. I broke out in a rash every time I touched one.
About half of Colorado is on fire right now, the fire department is on high alert and my house is at the top of the hill with the biggest infestation. So, no, no burning them 
It can be done! The big boy went on the lift today. Not very high because I was just swapping out shocks, but the point has been made. I was even able to drive it on after only moving one car - the Mini (cowering against the shelves on the side) was able to stay in place. I had loads of room to walk around the sides, although it was a bit close between the welding table and the front bumper. Close enough that I had to pay attention, but not really a squeeze. I think I'm going to round off the corner of that table so it's not quite so aggressive at trying to attack my gentleman sausage if I am careless.
To deal with The Law Of Flat Surfaces, I am trying this little thing. It was brought to my attention by one of the inhabitants of this forum - a $25 RÅSKOG cart from Ikea. I used it to hold all the tools and fasteners from the shock job, and when I was done I wheeled it over to the bench and put everything away. It could work at containing the tendency for everything flat to accumulate...stuff.
LOFS is an all too real thing. Ask me about a 13mm wrench and the funny tingling noise from the Exocet engine.
Keith, thanks for humoring me on the door discussion. I have started doing shop layouts with an 8 and 16ft doors now.
A question on one of my other shop-related threads brought me back here, so let's go through an update.
The focus of work shifted to the house (new kitchen, etc) so work stopped on the shop. But it's good enough that work can happen - I did a bunch of random work on the underside of the M5 and the Mini and the Targa Miata so the lift has been earning its keep. The big welding bench is covered in a Subaru engine build that will hopefully go into the Westie this weekend. It's still a little chaotic but the shop is functional. The rolling cabinet/workbenches have allowed me to reconfigure a few different times which is handy. More on that in a bit.
This necessated the buildup of the "house shop" up on the attached garage, I'll put up some info about that shortly. But this post is about the big shop.
The big thing has been heat. I realized late in the fall that I needed to do something about getting the heater up and running. If it was ever used before, it was probably propane powered. There are some concrete pads outside the shop that would take a tank or two. But the orifice size on the heater appears to be correct for natural gas. Weird. I looked at bringing in a big propane tank. I looked at using smaller tanks and swapping them out. I looked at running gas down from the house. Upon talking to a plumber, he recommended getting a new meter on the shop instead. Multiple reasons that were good ones, so that's what I decided to do. Running propane would be far less expensive to get going, but in the very long run simply having gas in the shop was the easiest option. I probably won't want to hump around 100 lb propane tanks in the middle of winter when I'm 20 years older. I'm not sure I want to do that now. Having the gas line responsible for the underground lines on the property means that breaks aren't my problem.
Step 1: call Xcel (the utility company). In order for the shop to have its own meter, it needs its own address.
Step 2: call the county. In under 10 minutes including pleasantries, I had a new address for the shop: Unit B. Seriously. That's all it takes.
Step 3: Call Xcel, give them the new address and request a new service. This was around Thanksgiving. I pulled anything that couldn't freeze out of the shop. Race tires, paint, fluids, etc. I even drained the coolant from the Targa Miata.
Then it gets slow. We got into a design phase with a shop in Denver. Then the design was submitted to Xcel and they gave me a quote that made me seriously question this. Still, you only pay once and you benefit for years, so I paid up. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, on April 26 I had a date for the work. I took the day off work and nobody showed up. Some phone calls and I was informed that it had been rescheduled and nobody had told me. I pointed out that nobody had ever actually come to lay eyeballs on the land, so the supervisor swung by. Once he actually saw the lot, he changed his plan from trenching to boring. A couple of days later, some really cool hardware showed up and they poked holes in my ground and ran some pipes. Done, right?
Well, no. Now the existing heater has to be inspected and tested, then a permit has to be pulled and the county has to sign off and then Xcel can install the meter. Then I can turn on the heater. Hopefully by next Thanksgiving. The weird thing is that the heater that I thought was running propane has an orifice sized for gas. We'll check pressures before lighting it up.
Phew. More later.
Quick fun update.
See, when I'm working on cars I'm often dirty or wearing gloves or both. That's not compatible with a smartphone, and I refuse to install an always-on microphone attached to an internet megacorporation with no oversight in my house. So I need some way to answer the phone when I'm in the shop. Enter this beast.
A proper mechanical ringer. A nice solid handset. Guts that were designed to run forever. And, to celebrate my history of working at Nortel Networks, I made sure to source a proper one.
Only problem is that we don't have a landline anymore and the shop isn't wired for one anyhow. Enter this little doohickey.
It's an inexpensive bluetooth adapter for a POTS* phone. It has a USB out so I can charge the cellphone at the same time. If the cellphone is plugged in, then I know where it is. I can even do voice dialing via Siri...somehow...but I'm more interested in answering calls. If I want to make a call, I'll wash my hands. The audio quality kinda sucks and I'm pretty sure it's this adapter, but I'll do a little troubleshooting to make sure. For the time being, it's good enough to do the job.
I can tell you that every time the phone rings, it makes me smile.
*Plain Old Telephone Service
I have been looking or something like that for a while, just ordered one.
I like that, too. I think I'd like to have something like that. I'm still wanting to see if I can repurpose an old tablet to show texts in larger print, so I can read them from across the garage instead of ditching my work gloves or cleaning my hands, and checking the phone.
Oh, and I didn't know you worked for Nortel in the past. At my first post college job, we used Nortel DMS-250s for out long distance network, and I was trained a bit on call routing with them.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I like how you hung the phone next to the Big Ass Fan controller.
Keith Tanner said:The audio quality kinda sucks and I'm pretty sure it's this adapter, but I'll do a little troubleshooting to make sure. For the time being, it's good enough to do the job.I can tell you that every time the phone rings, it makes me smile.
*Plain Old Telephone Service
It must be the dongle because our old Western Electric POTS phone sounds great (okay, as good as a landline can sound). Usually, it serves as a ringer for the all the cordless phones in the house. However, we also use it directly when we make important long distance phone calls, especially when talking to elderly family members because it's easier on their hearing.
Jerry From LA said:Keith Tanner said:The audio quality kinda sucks and I'm pretty sure it's this adapter, but I'll do a little troubleshooting to make sure. For the time being, it's good enough to do the job.I can tell you that every time the phone rings, it makes me smile.
*Plain Old Telephone Service
It must be the dongle because our old Western Electric POTS phone sounds great (okay, as good as a landline can sound). Usually, it serves as a ringer for the all the cordless phones in the house. However, we also use it directly when we make important long distance phone calls, especially when talking to elderly family members because it's easier on their hearing.
I don't know if this information is still useful to you, but there is similar functionality to the Cell2Jack with a cordless phone basestation with built-in Bluetooth. Many Panasonic phone systems have Link2Cell and they are available pretty cheap at thrift stores I frequent, with so many people dropping their landlines. Link2Cell has 2 modes, for use with or without a landline. I think I have 6 portable phones for use from my basestation, has a pretty long range, and its intercom function can be very useful.
So basically, any time the internet asks a worthy enough miata question, that bat-phone rings. Seems appropriate.
I was using the shop to do Real Work this weekend - building an engine, pulling an engine and modifying the engine mounts to suit some new parts. Cutting, grinding, bead blasting, assembly, hoisting...it's working well. I even reconfigured my space by wheeling one of my big wheely workbenches to a different area. Once I'm done with this job, I'll spend a day simply cleaning/tidying up and it'll be ready to show off.
But the AC is still struggling. It was around 80F in the shop this weekend with highs close to 100F outside. The AC unit just can't do the job. I did discover that there's a real temperature gradient as you move around the shop - near the doors, it's cooler than it is at the back where my workbench is. This is probably due to the fact that the AC unit is in the front half of the garage and the fan only blows up and down. A small fan at the front aiming towards the back may help that. Wouldn't take much.
I was looking at ways to cut down on heat gain on the roof, but a quick look around with the FLIR showed me this.
That's the west wall in late afternoon. The door is currently open, but check out how much heat is coming through the windows relative to the walls. The sun hammers this wall all afternoon. So I've ordered some reflective film for the windows to see if I can keep that heat out in the first place. Some sort of carport along that wall would also help a lot by shading it and give my poor outside cars somewhere to sleep. It's also possible that the FLIR is reading some of the visible light coming through those windows. But the window film is cheap and easy so it's job 1 :)
I did discover that the Big Ass Fan on 50% will move enough air in the middle of the shop that I have to either turn it down or shield my welding from it so the welding gas doesn't blow away when I'm welding at the back wall!
Now for a gratuitous photo of the work that was done this weekend, just to remind myself that even if I didn't get it finished I did get a lot done. It was a weekend of problems encountered and overcome.
I have pimped out the shop! Or whatever the kids say. We have tint.
This is BDF window film sourced from Amazon. Specifically, the EXS15 exterior film. The idea is to prevent the heat from getting in at all. This is a pretty dark tint, I use the 30 on house windows but these windows aren’t really for the view.
I’m sure there’s someone on the forum who’s been doing this forever, but from an amateur point of view it’s pretty easy if you just follow the instructions on the box. But really follow them. When it says “clean”, make it clean. I actually ran a razor blade over the glass to make sure. When it says to wet down the film and the glass, get it dripping. Then it’s fairly straightforward.
Install oversized,then cut to fit.
From the inside. Obviously I did both sides :)
How much did it drop the heat transfer through the windows?
Dont know yet, the sun hasn’t hit the windows yet :) I’ll bring out the FLIR later. At the very least, it made the shop look less junky.
This is why the only windows in my shop face North. No sun baking the inside.
Great Jorb!
I’m having trouble with the FLIR autoranging, but it does appear the windows are now much closer in temp to the rest of the wall. So I’m going to call that a win. The AC is also running less.
Surprising side effect of the tint. I used to have the world's saddest set of saggy miniblinds in those windows - you can see them in the exterior shots above. With the mirror tint in place, I took them down. There's now a lot more light inside. So the tint has made the garage brighter, not darker. Didn't see that coming.
I'm not entirely sure what winter is like at your elevation, but what will that mirror tint do in the winter? Light and or heat wise? Seeing how low cost it is is giving me ideas.
Well, I'm Canadian so I consider the winter mild. I'm not 100% sure the shop actually froze this past winter, between the solar energy and the insulated building I think it stayed just above freezing.
The mirror tint will cut down on solar gain - that's what it's for! - but that's less of a concern than the blasting heat in the summer around here. The windows don't really let enough light in to be useful as the only source of light, so darkness in the winter months isn't that big a deal.
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