Snell-Pym

My new workshop (by alaric)

I took the day off of work on my birthday, to do something I'd been dying to do since we moved in - get my workshop set up to a state where I can actually use it.

To begin with, I had a load of things to put away. The floor was covered in boxes that needed unpacking, but as soon as I'd cleared enough to get sufficient access, I put up my big shelf.

It goes on the wall above my welding bench:

Drilling into masonry can be a pain, especially coarse breeze blocks like those, which are comprised of a load of tiny stones joined together with cement; the bit will tend to wander into a convenient gap between stones rather than ploughing through the wall where I want it to go. So the only thing to do is to break out my serious drill. Which I call Vera:

Vera is an SDS+ drill, which means it has a special chuck and takes special bits. The chuck fixing is actually designed for hammer drilling, unlike standard drill chucks, which means the drill can apply a much more significant and reliable hammering force. As such, it glides through walls like this in the way a normall drill glides through plywood.

As such, in no time I had each bracket mounted with 6x40mm screws into 10mm diameter wall plugs:

I could then life the shelf into place:

However, Vera's SDS+ chuck can't drive ordinary bits (although I do have an SDS+ to ordinary chuck adapter, but Vera would really be overkill for the next step), so I used my cordless drill to predrill holes for the screws into the bottom of the shelf. I like to think of this drill as Vera's filthy little sister, as it's fast and easy. The observant will also notice that it goes up to eleven:

Having done that, I screwed the shelf onto the brackets so it won't budge:

With the shelf up I could then put even more stuff away. I've made a little guided tour movie:

There's still more to do - I need to get Ethernet cabling down there so I can get Internet access, and I need to fix the leaking flat roof, and do something about the draughty eaves and the ivy creeping in. But now that the floor is clear and things are in useful places, I can actually use the workshop, which is great.

So two days later, I performed my first project. We needed a coathook for children's coats and bags, and we found the perfect design in a shop, except it was made to hang over the top of a door rather than to be mounted on the wall.

Not a problem when you own metal working tools.

First off, I used the angle grinder to chop the bits that go over the top of the door off, then with them out of the way, went in and neatly chopped the long metal bits off close to the part we wanted: