Now that you’ve got me thinking, it might be kind of neat to have a window over the workbench, much like a window can be nice to have over a kitchen sink.
Exactly! In good weather, I prefer to be outdoors. And in bad weather, I prefer to view the outdoors
from a warm, dry vantage point. :0) Anyway, I found an old photo of the main work bench with a
view of a nice rural back yard in a densely forested area in VT:
Old 4-speed Top Loader after installing fresh bearings & synchros
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1) If you look carefully at the reflection in the window, you can also see that we lit this garage
with plenty of (then new) compact fluorescent bulbs. Each 23W bulb replaced a 100W incandescent,
so that gave us a 4:1 power consumption improvement. (Pretty heady stuff in the '00s)
In addition, we wired the lights 5 to a circuit, with 5 circuits, each on it's own switch. So if I was
working solo, I could control how much light I needed. Usually I'd turn on a couple of circuits over
where I was working - more than enough light where I was working for 230 watts total. Meanwhile,
the 3 other circuits were off. But if we had several people in the shop then all 25 were on, for a
total
usage of 575 watts.
At the time, electricity was somewhere around 12¢ per kilowatt-hour, so solo I could have all the light
I needed for a 4-hour session for ~12¢. Today, the 100W-equivalent LEDs are down to 15 watts --
that's only 375 watts for all 25 bulbs. (!)
2) After soaking several previous wooden workbenches with engine oil, stinky 90-wt, coolant, etc., the decision was
made to put a few coats of polyurethane down on the plywood (finished 1 side) before putting it into
service. NOTE: The counter-argument to finishing the workbench was that it would be 'too pretty' to
use.
The solution? A local business that specialized in installing custom kitchen countertops had some
waste (in the form of kitchen sink cutouts) that they would sell for a song. We bought a couple, marked
them as "work surface", and then the rule became if you needed to really wrestle around with something
that would gouge the workbench, then you put the offending piece on the 'don't care' Formica work surface
atop the workbench. Wail away to your heart's content! :0)
This has worked ever since, and cleanup only takes seconds using Behold and a cleaning rag. As a bonus,
the shop no longer has that persistent 90-wt funk in the air.
3) It can't be seen in the photo, but we set this shop up where *everything* was on wheels. The ability to
reconfigure the shop to best meet the needs of the current project made it work like it was 50%
bigger than it was, thanks to being able to get rid of pinch-points that would inevitably develop.
****
Judging from all the responses to this thread, you have really found a subject that gets the
collective juices flowing. Moving up from looking for a dropped nut in gravel while it's raining
to a finished concrete floor is a giant leap for those doing their own work on their GMT400s.
But for a lucky few, they take their workspace to the next level, where it ends up somewhere
between a motorhead Day Spa and a Zen Garden. With a pinball machine.
