Now Playing: Man! I need to clean my shop!
Yesterday, while cutting the shim stock for pattern welding, I took a look around my shop. I wasn’t pleased with what I saw. As you could see in yesterday photo of the coil of 1095, the floor is almost black in places with iron oxide and grinding dust. The other end of the shop is covered in the stone dust from the soapstone I was grinding on last week. The workbenches and drill press table are covered with tools and bits of projects, to the point where you can no longer see table surface in most places.
The bad news, is this state of affairs is not going to change anytime soon. With the work I need to catch-up form the last two months of emotional and physical shutdown, and the upcoming projects, I just have time for a full-blown shop-cleaning day. I will be luck if I manage to clean as I go a little and pick-up as I use areas of the shop.
And this weekend it was once again highlighted that this tendency towards a messy shop, is genetic, or least learned at a very early age.
During the remembrance for my folks this last weekend, their next-door neighbor spoke about Mom and Dad’s home. He talked about the construction of the house, and the care Mom and Dad took not to block his view. How they would get together to make the landscaping flow from one property to the next. And then he talked about Dad’s shop. As he said, the garage was 900 square feet (not kidding here, it really is), and yet there was no room and you could hardly move around in it.
And now I need to find a way to shoehorn some of that stuff into my shop. Likewise my brother has to shoehorn some into his shop. What’s left will be donated to the EAA’s workshop at the Camarillo airport. But Doug and I both have a lot of memories tied up in Dad’s shop. So we are trying to make the right choices and keep some of those machines in the family.
Scott B. Jaqua
Hagerson Forge.
