My Shop

To address the as-yet-unused tag for this blog I want to give a virtual tour of my shop.

I only got into woodworking recently, when I learned that a friend of mine from work was actively involved.  He has done lots of work in the US, but on moving here had decided to use only hand tools.  As he had sold or stored all of his power tools in the US, and it was fairly useless to bring them with him, this made a lot of sense.  Getting into woodworking myself, I have to say that this did NOT make a lot of sense to me.  One of the first things I bought was a router.

I have come around.  There are still some tools that I very much want but given that MWF, the boy, the dog, and I will eventually (probably) move back to the US, I just don't think that it makes a lot of sense to invest thousands of Euro in tools that I can't take back.  And it's not that I can't take them back, but the killer is the frequency conversion.  230V to 120V is doable, but 50Hz to 60Hz just isn't.  So, hand tools for me, which is a good thing anyway (in most regards, but I will get to that).

Back to when my friend was still here in Dresden, he rented out extra space in the basement of his building to set up his own shop.  It was a pretty sweet deal for him, since he just had to ride the elevator down and BAM!, to work.  When he left I took over the shop space and thus am now the proud renter of 18 square meters across the river from where I live.

Here is my shop:

Okay, I exaggerate a bit.  Please note the bottom left of the building:

My shop, being in the basement, lies under the rooms connected to that ground floor balcony.  Going in, and down, this is my domain:

The jointer/planer is on loan from a friend who bought it, but never used it.  I only just recently got it set up and working, and will give it back to my friend.  There are just too many issues with it.  The other power tools you can see in the picture are mine, and I am quite pleased with them.  The chop saw was a gift from many friends on my birthday a couple of years ago and has been good to me.  For a project that I currently have going which uses an insane amount of bridal joints, MWF was nice enough to agree to let me buy the drill press, to clear out most of the waste.  Other than that, not in the picture are the aforementioned router, a small circular saw, and a random orbital sander.

Stacked neatly under the workbench is a project that has been on hold for quite a while.  The short story is that I need some fairly large plates for a shoe chest, and I have been struggling quite a bit to get stuff that doesn't cup and warp on me.  Until I get that figured out, the project is on hiatus.  Incidentally, this is what I hoped the jointer would help with, to get some nice boards to glue up into what I need.  That has now been scrapped and the project will go on with all hand tools, but more on that later.

Of some importance to the ambience is this little setup:

The most important "tool" in the shop is because of this:

That's the blade from a #4 Stanley Handyman set up for reference.  The walls of the building are very, very think sandstone.  The good thing about that is the good insulation properties of the room.  Not too hot in the summer, and not too cold in the winter (German houses are not too keen on central heating, and there is no radiator in the room).  Overall good, but sandstone is quite porous and as the room sits underground, the damp is a major, major problem.  Thus, the most important thing in the shop is this little guy:

The dehumidifier runs all the time, and gets emptied about once a week.

Welcome to my shop.  Maybe next time I'll actually show you some of my work, but I'll need to get over some of the embarassment.

Payoff

Let me start with the best part:

Things move unbelievably fast in baby world.  He is just over 8 weeks old, but the changes day to day are tough to document if you don't...document it.

MWF and I had a project for a little bit (I think we made it all of about two weeks) to take a picture of the boy every day.  The idea, and it's an obvious one, is that being so involved with him we won't note the big changes.  They will sneak up on us, like the proverbial thief in the night (but the opposite), and we will look up one day and the boy will be able to do all kinds of stuff that he couldn't before.  Plus, he's changing (and being changed, natch) constantly, and will continue to for the next couple of decades.  Better to have more than my memory to remember the boy's tiny time.

Living in Germany, and harboring some pretty serious Porsche lust, I was talking to some colleagues about a show I had seen on TV here.  It was a standard weekly car show, but the focus was on Porsche models, specifically the GT3 RS.  There was also another, aftermarket, version featured, with 660+ hp.  The deal was, they showed the car being driven on the autobahn, with some commentary, and you could just see the car not even hesitate at the 300 kph limit.  It just kept going.  Insane.

Anyway, I was talking about this show to some of my colleagues during a team event we had last week.  One of my colleagues had previously worked in an auto shop, and had the opportunity to drive some seriously insane cars.  As I was talking about how scared I got driving at 240 kph (and seriously, it was terrifying), he was talking about how at 270 kph, he felt like the road narrowed down to a tunnel.

I say all this as a way of saying that it is just the same with the boy.  One the one hand, they come out, and they are these tiny, squalling things.    They fill your heart up, though, and make it bigger, and keep doing it, and I find that, small as he is, my world often narrows to just him and he is all I can, or want to, concentrate on.  And it is the most unbelievable thing in the world.