The First Cleaning

Once the floor outlets were finished and tested to be working, I was ready to start rearranging the tools and cabinets in the shop to test out some placement ideas. I also wanted to get in a good sweeping because the concrete floor had accumulated over a year of dust, debris, and parts of nameless bugs and spiders that had somehow found their way inside my basement. To see just how large a job I was about to undertake, here’s some pics of the mess.

As you can see, I had my work cut out for me. You can see in the pictures the various tools that I have. Note the copious amounts of surface rust obtained during their long years in storage. Another job for another day. You can also see in the background of many of them the outlets – the black/orange ones are the 220v and the others are standard.

After a good amount of sweeping and rearranging, I finally had a clean wall, and managed to move the radial arm saw and drawers to their proposed final location. I’m looking forward to organizing these drawers and taking full advantage of their storage capability. This unit was given to me years ago by someone moving out of town. It is actually an old card catalog from a library and works perfectly for small tools, etc. Most of the drawer slide bearings were completely seized up, so it took a good while to lubricate everything and get the drawers sliding in and out smoothly. It’s a good working height for me, and I plan to incorporate it into the full wall’s cabinets (to be built) as a miter saw/radial arm saw station. To do this, however, I’ll need to replace the top and cut off that extra portion where some long-lost unit was presumably attached.

The day was not without its mishaps. When moving the jointer from a temporary rolling stand (actually the table saw’s stand) onto one designed for it’s base size, I managed to actually flip the thing on its side. Once it started tilting, I had no hope of stopping its descent, but I did manage to slow it down significantly. Significantly enough, actually, that the box of glasses managed to fall to the ground without breaking a single glass. If only my back would have been so lucky…

With some help from my wife I managed to right the jointer on the proper stand and it didn’t even have a scratch on it. What a relief!

At any rate, I continued with this process and finally got the big tools where I think they will go. Of course, some will undoubtedly move eventually, but at least now they’re in a usable place. Here was the result of the day’s efforts.

Next will be double checking the tools performance, replacing any belts necessary, and continuing cleaning and organizing the side room, which quickly became the where-I-put-stuff-I-don’t-know-where-it-should-go room.