ajoeiam
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I inherited my dad's lathe and mill when he died in 2006, and started setting up a shop in my 2-car garage.
My wife has never let me forget that she no longer has a garage to pull into, but I bought her some other nice stuff, so we reached sort of a settlement/truce.
There was the problem of what to do with what was already in the garage, and then the layout, etc. for a machining-only barstock-build-only shop.
Then I got the foundry bug, and so incorprated woodworking equipment for pattern making, plus foundry equipment and supplies, and then purchased a few full-sized steam engines and pumps (New York Safety steam engine, Wach steam engine, Lister diesel, Baker pump jack monitor, simplex and duplex steam pumps, etc. in 2nd photo).
So my shop has morphed a great deal over the years, and it seems like I take three steps forward, and then five backwards.
Quite frankly, I need a new very large shop, but that is not going to happen.
Here are a few photos of my garage shop, over the years.
One thing is for sure, it is difficult to try and set up and/or change a shop and also do major projects in the shop at the same time.
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View attachment 154948View attachment 154949View attachment 154950
Hmmmmmm - - - - you're declaiming how terrible your shop is - - yet in pic three you have shown part of it that's in pretty decent order.
You might want to start by slowly expanding the area that looks like pic three (slowly is the key word here).
(My experience was that when there is only 'one cook in the kitchen' you can have things sorta terrible. Except what I found was that when you want high quality and/or high accuracy - - - - well - - - - really really tough to get in a non-organized shop. Then ran into the statistic that a machinist spent 18% of their day looks for tools - - - crap that got me right po'ed - - - I don't have that much time - - - so organization started becoming more important - - - its still a work in progress though!!)