I am close by (15 minute drive). If you want to come look at what I did, I would be happy to arrange it.
Three things to think about in Michigan:
1) How much do you want to use it in the winter - that goes to heating
2) How much of your summer stuff do you need to store - deck chairs, mowers, etc. If you don't have storage space, it will end up in the shop
3) How many half finished projects will you have, the more, the more storage space you will need.
I built a 30 by 45 barn and split it into parts:
1) A loft for deep storage (e.g. pool stuff, winter covers, special lumber, etc)
2) A 2 car garage that holds the mower and other outdoor equipment, plus my 15 year old van that I use to go to the saw mill, etc
3) An alleyway that holds my greenhouse stuff and other tools that support my garden, greenhouse and orchard.
4) My workshop
If I had it to do over again, I probably would do it differently today. But I decided 15 years ago when greenhouses were more interesting and wooodworking less so. I made a lot of mistakes that someday, I will have to fix.
Wood workers in your situation don't have garages, they have workshops. Tell your wife a heated garage is horrible for cars any where salt is part of winter.
And there's the whole issue of snow,
Salt doesn't rust stuff, salt water does. Your cars can be caked with frozen salt all winter and no rust until the salt/ice mixture thaws and turns to salt water, which rusts anything capable of rusting. Placing your car in a heated garage will cause a daily thaw cycle conducive to rust. Explain this to your wife carefully so she parks her car outside and use the garage for it's intended purpose, a wood shop. (worked for me)
I always dreamed of having a nice out building for my workshop. I'm now very happy that never happened. If you have a commercial shop, where you are forced to spend 8 - 18 hours a day in your shop, sure, good to have a separate building. If you are a hobbyist, even a serious one, having it as part of your home is super. When I was young I spent long days in my shop, now, I spend small chunks of time. I just walk down the steps to my warm shop when ever, and for as long as I wish. No need to heat it, no need to tramp though the snow to get to a cold shop. Everything is there waiting for me. I would buy the one with a huge outbuilding, use the huge outbuilding for the garage and storage of all the junk you and your family should be collecting.
A two car garage 24x24 at least is the minimum comfortable size for a complete wood shop for a hobbyist, which you certainly are from what you say. Lathe, drill press, bandsaw, jig saw can all be placed against one wall, with room for a shaper or planer on wheels against the same wall. Table saw and jointer ideally should be on same bench, on wheels.
IMO, 24x24 is minimal, and quite enough. Bigger would be nice for a crazy stuff like spray booth, storage of half built junk, odd hardware/jigs and so on, but 24x24 is a good size for the shop. Almost everyone here thinks you can't have too much room, but I don't agree. A hobbyist in a warehouse would be walking around way too much and would end up with all his tools in a small, 32x32' space anyhow. Compact is good, and I'd say for most stuff a hobbyist does, you want minimum size, plus a little extra room to breath. If you plan on commercially building house trusses for a living, or house boats, you need more room. Building kitchen cabinets, desks, end tables, book cases, chairs, and so on, smaller is OK. If I were building my own, I'd build 32x32, and put my compressor and dust collector in a separate partition/room so I didn't have to listen to them.
My suggestion on tools is get the best you can afford. If you are filthy, stinking rich, Festools and such are fine, if you are poor, or like me, cheap, look for quality used tools. Cheap (new) tools are seldom a good deal, although there are some exceptions in hand tools, I don't think there are any exceptions on stationary tools. I don't want to own a cheap bandsaw or table saw, or jointer, for example.
Personally, my most used tools are the table saw, drill press and bandsaw, and if I were advising someone on which tools to buy first, they would be the first 3, followed by a disk/belt sander combo. If your primary interest is turning bowls or pens, this would not work:-)
I would opt for building one. Even if it is pre-fab steel.
Even if you built a garage to house all your cars *PLUS* space for a generously sized shop area, one is going to get overflow from the other. Best to have areas dedicated to one function, IMO. ____________________
Mine is 20 x 28. Works OK but could be bigger. Play with this...
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did and wound up with this
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on the left side except for the lathe are on castors as are the router table and drum sander.
The grid is 2' x 2' and things are pretty accurately sized except for the depth of the upper cabinets; they are 12-13" deep. ___________________
Depends on what you are machining. A table saw needs at least 8' in both front and back; width sufficent for what you are cutting plus room to get around it. Same for a BS but it can be on a castor base, stored against a wall and pulled out into an aisle when being used. Ditto DP. ______________________
One of the biggest suckers up of space is storing material. And jigs. Give
*LOTS* of thought to that. And to electrical outlets...one every 4-5 feet is not overkill; and put them at counter height. ______________________
I use the area on the jpg of my shop where the roll around tables are for assembly and finishing. If I were spraying often I'd want an area just for that. I do have a protected but not roofed area outside the shop that I sometimes use now. ______________________
The two tools I could live without if I had to are my joiner and the drill press. I joined edges for a long time on a router table. The DP gets little use but is handy when I need it.
My most used tools are the cabinet saw and the drum sander. I use the latter constantly to plane and size rough lumber; it is somewhat slower than a thickness planer but there is never any tear out or knife marks either. For me, it pretty much replaces both a planer and joiner. The ability to sand up to 32" wide is not to be sneezed at either.
I use a blue insulating 3/4x4x8 foam sheeting by RMax called R-Matte-3 ($10/sht +/-)
This one has had about 30 sheets cut on it and is still going strong. The saw is set to cut about 1mm into the foam insulation. It also helps a bit with mitigating splinter/tearout on good-side-down cutting with some materials:
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has a cool breakdown, 2 x 4, cutting table that fits on folding saw horses he designed and built that we also put the foam sheet on when cutting, although like Han's rough cut table, it is not necessary.
"dadiOH" wrote in news:4d31c917$0$23836$ snipped-for-privacy@usenet-news.net:
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I like the idea of having some nice and low (traditional height 12-14") and a whole bunch more at countertop height. That's how my garage is set up in places, and it's nice when I need an extension cord run semi- permanently because I don't lose 3' running up the wall.
I'd also suggest having some at least 52" high. Don't put them at 48", you need the extra height for getting over stored sheet goods and shelves that you decide to build at 48"... and then measure the switch height.
"A. W. Dunstan" wrote in news:-vidnX53qMh6Ta3QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@speakeasy.net:
When considering tools, consider their infeed and outfeed requirements. To cut a 8' sheet on the table saw, you need 8' in front of the saw and
8' behind it. One of the things I did laying out my shop was determine those spaces and put them in as part of the plan.
Dust collection and air compressors are loud noisy things I'd suggest putting behind a partition wall if possible. A big cyclone dust collector would be a good thing to have for a permanent shop.
If building, build a small building close to the house for the trash and miscellaneous garden tool storage. It can be part of the garage, if need be. Build your shop farther out. You'll be happy to walk out to the shop in the snow, but the rest of your family won't be as happy to walk past your shop to get to the snow shovel or garbage can.
One of my annoyances with my set up is there's no dust free area for finishing. If I paint or poly, I can't do anything for several hours to prevent messing up the finish. One of these days, I might build a little booth (say 8x8 or 10x10) to keep the dust out so as one project is drying I can start work on another. I wonder how hard it would be to make one that could be assembled and disassembled with only one person?
Size wise, there's usually no such thing as too much space. My shop fits into a space about 25x30, but the storage is a little disorganized and there's a bunch of other stuff on the other side of the garage. (See garden tool comment above.)
For me, this is interesting question in itself. Has it got a standard answer? I would (like to) envision temporary "walls" created with the equivalent of a shower curtain, except it would, I suppose, need to reach to the ceiling and the floor. Basically a dust-free (and bug-free) zone.
Bill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news3.newsguy.com:
I was thinking about something similar to house walls, 2x4 construction with studs every so many inches and maybe 1/2" plywood or something lighter on the walls. For something designed to be taken down after use, plastic sheeting just wouldn't hold up.
If I used screws or bolts through the top and bottom plate, then the whole thing could be stored as a compact pile of around a dozen 2x4s when not in use. Sheets or blankets could then be draped over the structure to keep the dust out. The seal doesn't need to be 100%, just enough to keep the sawdust from settling on the workpiece.
Since you are just trying to keep out dust, a dozen 2x4s seems like real overkill. Maybe if a few hooks were attached to the ceiling, tarps could be hung? I think even it it wasn't perfect, it might be pretty good. Lets keep thinking about this one.
Bill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news5.newsguy.com:
I have a garage door opener in the way, so I was thinking of building what amounts to a dog cage to drape plastic or tarps over. A kind of temporary "finishing room" rather than a "hat" to protect the project. Some of those finish vapors aren't fit for human co-habitation so you wouldn't *want* to be in the shop with those things drying.
The hat approach would work, though. Just a simple frame to cover the project while you work on something else. Even a plastic storage tote would work.
Easy way to do this would be to rig a "shower curtain", the same kind of deal as the privacy curtains they have in hospitals. Won't keep all the dust out but it will stop most of it and if you can rig a (small) filtered fan to keep positive pressure in the area that should do for the rest.
seems to have everything you need including curved tracks, if you want to do it the fancy way--note that I have never done business with that company and have no idea if they are reputable or not--I found it while looking for a picture of the sort of arrangement I was talking about.
One can probably do well enough though just hanging some conduit, bent as needed, and using shower curtain hooks and blue tarps.
I recently upgraded to a 3 car shop and actually did the lay out on the computer. I used Sketchup with all the free importable machine components to arrange in the model of our new house/garage.
I have the same problem. I too would advocate a finishing room if building.
I don't know how old the original poster is, but at my age a toilet would certainly save a few trips back to the house. And if he's installing plumbing he might as well put in a sink while he's at it.
I like the idea you've described. Would you mount a filtered fan designed for a computer to your "shower curtain" or did you have something bigger in mind? Nice idea!
I built a spray area out of canvas type drop cloths. I staple them to the rafter, and staple a 2 x 4 to the bottom of them to hold tension on them and seal against the floor. A door can be made by overlapping two sections by a couple feet and using a separate 2 x for that part on one of the double layers. That can be a bother, and I have just been redoing my area by taking an old door, making a frame out of lumber that I can attach my cloth walls to, so I can go in and out through a real door. It is nicer, but more expensive, and takes a little more room.
One thing nobody has mentioned is the problem of paint, or other finishes or glues odors getting into the house from a basement or attached garage workshop. It is a huge problem for me, since hydrocarbons are a trigger for migraine headaches for my wife. I solved the problem by making a finish area in one corner, and use a furnace blower to pull a little negative pressure in the finish area. No smell can go against the flow of air to make it into the house, as long as the blower keeps running. I put it in a wooden box on wheels, and plumb it to the spray area by using a 12 inch flexible furnace duct going though a removable panel with a hole in the garage door. Works great. I can spray anything I want and let it dry, and she never smells the first hint. Be sure to use a squirrel cage blower, because fans do not create enough pressure differential, unless they are really screaming.
The same can work for a finish area, but there can be a variation or two. You can push fresh outside air into the area through a filter to keep outside dust out of the room, and keep dust from the shop forced out of the area, or you can pull a negative pressure in the area, as long as everything seals pretty good in the shop to spray area. You then make a restricted air intake from the shop to the finish area by using a couple hyper allergenic furnace filters so no woodworking dust gets into the finish area. This has the advantage of being heated or cooled air, if the rest of the shop has those things for it's air.
When you don't need the finish area, roll up the cloths to the ceiling and secure them with some light ropes like furling sails, or some pinch clamps to hold the roll together.
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