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Every guy needs a shop right? My shop is a detached two car garage. Ideally, I would like to use my shop for woodworking, auto repairs and household maintenance. When I bought our house in 2003, the garage was in decent condition. It had an outlet that was shared with the lights in the house, a garage door opener with no remote, and a door in the sidewall that looked like it would fall in if you leaned on it. I immediately installed a remote, one for myself and one for my wife. Of course, neither of our cars fit in the garage and there are two broken down cars in front of the garage.
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About a year after I bought the house Chris and I had the 1950's circuit panel upgraded to a new 200 AMP panel. While the electrician was upgrading the panel I had him pull an additional dedicate 110 VAC circuit and a dedicate 220 VAC circuit out to the garage. The lights in the shop are on a shared circuit with the lights in the house. I installed three light switches. One is for the florescent light fixture above the workbench. The second switch will be for two florescent light fixture above the car bays. The third switch is for future growth. I'm in the process of connecting the dedicated 110 VAC to mulitiple quad boxes installed around the garage. The dedicated 220 VAC will be installed last, when I determine that actually tool location. The partially installed electrial system is working quite well. My tools used to trip the circuit all the time, which would take out the plugs in the house. Now my tools never trip a cicruit. If they do, that's ok because all the clocks in the house won't have to be reset.
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Thanksgiving Day 2004, Chris reminded me that we needed to replace the door in the side of the garage before the stucco guy came to fix the walls from the electrical upgrade. That was all I needed to hear. After breakfast I grabbed my tools and ripped out the old door. The day after Thanksgiving I purchased an exterior door frame kit and built a new frame for the original solid wood that was originally installed on the back of the house. That weekend Chris and I bought some 2 x 4's, a 2 x 8'and some nails. We opened the hole in the wall enough to accept the larger door and framed it ourselves. We created a 4 x 8 header out of the 2 x 8 and with a piece of 1/2" plywood sandwiched in the middle. We took extra care to make sure the framing was as straight and strong as possible. It came out really well for never having done that before, it came out very well. The door does not swing when left open, so we know it's square.
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Now that the structure is squared away and the electrical is sufficient, I need sort out the rest of our stuff and figure out where the tools are going to go. To date we have collected the following power tools:
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- Rockwell 10" contractor's table saw (34-440) w/30" Delta Unifence
- Grizzly 14" band saw (G0555)
- Grizzly 12 Speed Heavy-Duty 14" Floor Drill press (G7944)
- Delta 6" X5 Jointer (37-275X)
- Delta 13" Two-speed Finishing Planer (22-580)
- Williams & Hussey molder (W-7)
- Delta Hollow Chisel Mortiser (14-650 Type 2)
- Delta 10" Compound Miter Saw (36-075)
- Dewalt 10" Radial Arm Saw (7779)
- Rockler router table
- Porter cable pancake compressor
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Now that we have collected all the tools we feel we need to build fine quality furniture and fixtures, we need to organize the garage. Last night I started pulling out some home built storage and arranging my power tools.
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