It's been a long time coming and while it's not completely finished, it's in good enough shape to start the next project. All in all, it's been about 2 1/2 months since the move and I'll consider today as the day of completion. The new shop is a three car, tandem garage. Doing the move ourselves and for the sake of time, the shop became the dumping ground for a majority of the items from the move. After a few weeks of slowly clearing items out and into the house, the work could begin.
The first step was running all of the electrical for the lighting and 220V for the tools. All in all, there are 11 outlets on 7 circuits with 3 of those being dedicated circuits for the table saw, planer, and jointer. As suggested by others by reading previous posts, I ran all 10 gauge wire (none of my tools currently pull more than 30A) for the future flexibilty of swapping only breakers and receptacles when or if I modify the layout, add a new tool, etc. This was an additional expense for the larger wire but well worth it for me as it was quite time consuming to pull wire. All of the wire was run in 3/4" EMT conduit with surface mounted boxes and as a word of warning, be sure you double check the maximum number of conductors based on the conduit size.
The other half of the electrical portion was the lighting. I ended up going with 8' tandem T5 fixtures spaced at about 7' o.c. For the lighting, I used 14 gauge wire in 1/2" conduit. I'm in the camp of you never can have too much light and I think the spacing and quantity of lights is just about right. Adding another row of two fixtures would have probably been too much and air traffic control might have had an issue with planes diverting.
So as to not bore everyone with monotonous details, the next few steps were shop layout, installing lumber racks, installing cabinets, installing a clamp rack, etc. Then, of course, the unpacking process to get everything in place. Overall, I'm happy with the current layout and as I start working in there, I'll probably make some re-arrangements over time. Even though the shop space is slightly larger than before, I'd say the usable space is slightly less so I tried several different arrangements using Sketchup based on my previous work flow, so we'll see how it pans out.
Somewhat of a side note, there have been some recent posts regarding moving/lifting larger equipment so I figured I'd share my method that others may find helpful. I rented a 2 ton rated, towable engine hoist to do the job and to document the stages, I chose the jointer. Aside from the table saw, all other pieces of equipment in my shop are either on mobile bases or have built-in mobile bases but the jointer is one of those peculiar pieces of equipment. The center of gravity isn't in the geometric center as expected and the footprint of the base is irregular. Just a couple of items to note:
1. The most time consuming portion of the process, which was maybe 30 minutes, was getting the jointer balanced once lifted, which took maybe 3 to 4 adjustments of the sling. I did several test lifts, only lifting about an inch off of the pallet to ensure it was balanced.
2. Granted, I did have a pallet jack, which was a necessity, so because of the overall height of the outriggers of the engine hoist being taller than the openings underneath the pallet, I had to block-up with 2x's to get the needed clearance for the outriggers.
3. With the wide footprint of the base of the jointer, you'll notice that the outriggers are oriented perpendicular to the jointer to lift it from the pallet ("lift1" pic). After rolling the engine hoist back to remove the pallet ("lift2" pic), the jointer was rotated 90 degrees to be "parallel" with the outriggers so the jointer would fit between the outriggers when lowered to the ground ("lift3" pic).
Hopefully, that helps or at least gives yet another idea on how to successfully move equipment.
Thanks for reading,
Brett
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