2022-02-07 Workshop Project Prep
The main problems this month have been planning for building the first wood-workshop bench. The unexpected surprise was discovering a radon issue in the basement. Outdoors was pretty good. This week has been generally sunny with lots of snow and temperatures from -2 Celsius to -18.
The Workshop Plan
The background is that the 1940s farmhouse has a large basement. One of the basement rooms has some old original bread ovens in it, connected to a large central masonry chimney. It’s a large room that would be suitable for a small workshop. The original thin concrete floor has warped and cracked over the years. Last year I painted the floor to reduce dust from the rough concrete. I also applied a tough type of mortar screed to the walls. The walls were poured concrete but had had a course breezeblock-type finish before the screed.
My plan was to start setting up a woodwork area in the basement. I thought it would be cheaper in the long term to create a lot of my own things for the house, instead of buying them. Plus I could do a creative hobby that isn’t related to computers and that I can do no matter the weather.
I watched a few videos of different workbenches people have built. In the end, I decided to build the workbench in the video that Rex Krueger published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2C5NRS1uLE&t=903s. Using this months income, I ordered a minimal set of tools for the build, and also got a Radon detector as it would be in a basement.
Tooling up
I had no idea planes could be so expensive, or that people could complain so much about the cheaper ones. The most expensive seems to be roughly 400 euros/dollars/pounds. The cheapest makes are thought to be different product lines from the same factory. I could get two cheap planes – a standard plane and a longer Jack plane – but then I would have needed to get more tools to make the plane right. I would have to spend a lot of time improving the tools. Or improve my Swedish to the point I can barter with the local engineering place to skim the plane faces flat and to 90 degrees which would cost money also.
It seemed like a false economy to go cheap. I went for the midrange planes that would be good enough from the box. Likewise for saws and chisels. The local hardware shop had clamps. It costs a lot to do the initial “tool up” so I’m only buying tools as I need them.
I was able to contact a friend and get planned wood delivered for the project, which was fun to try and move down into the basement. The wood is now acclimatising for at least a couple of weeks before it is used, as otherwise, it will deform. As an edit, here is a photo from a little later in the month:
Spanner in the Works
The first sign of trouble was when the new Radon meter immediately turned to alerting a red signal and issued dire warnings of Radon presence. I’ll give the details of how I’m handling that in another post but it caused the months priorities to change. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have spent any money on tools until getting the radon measurement.
