squall_line said:
raceguy-
You mentioned that your shop had a fire a few years back and you started from scratch? Everything definitely looks fresh and new (especially the concrete outside).
It sucks to lose everything and have to start over, but I would imagine it's a good opportunity to clean out accumulated bad habits and kludges and do things right from the get-go. Having an understanding of how the shop flows best after 10-20-30 years of operation is certainly helpful in that regard, too.
Yes, the entire shop was destroyed by a fire in August of '19. We were already in the planning stages of moving, with this new building already under construction. The outer walls, roof and concrete floor were in place, but that was it. The original plan was to upgrade much of what we already had, but some of it was supposed to move with us.
The storage system, beam saw and auto-feed CNC were already in the works. The "second" CNC was supposed to have been the "old one" from the previous shop. The outdoor dust collector was supposed to be moved too. It was a little smaller, but would have worked and was only about 2 years old. The edgebander and dowel inserter were to move also, along with the Sawstops and vertical panel saw. I think the only other planned major upgrade was the case clamps. The old ones had individual pneumatic press heads, rather than the far more automatic beam style presses.
This gave us the opportunity to buy everything in a massive bulk purchase, at matching and integrated. Although it looks great (now) and it all works together well, it was a devastating loss at the same time, not only for the company as a whole, but all of us as employees.
We were fortunate in the fact that the building was already in the works, but it would be 5 months before we could move into it. Of course there were losses to finished products too and contracts to honor, so we couldn't wait for that to happen. We moved into a temporary facility after a couple of weeks and started from scratch. This is "sort of" why we have such a nice secondary CNC machine. Our older machine was to have been the secondary. That machine was the one that was purchased to go into the temporary building. It was just a warehouse space, totally unequipped.
As employees, we lost everything too, so literally from scratch. After the usual home center stuff like the big black tool box and Makita drill, impact driver and typical hand tools, the work to rebuild infrastructure started. Of course the company bought a bunch of the basics too, the Sawstops, the Laguna slider saw (horizontal panel saw) and a handful of small point of use dust collectors, to get things going.
My initial outlay for my Festool equipment and the Bessey clamps was over 10k. That's how I really got started with the TS55. I built my cutting station with Peter Parfit's system. I had an interest in it before, but didn't have the space in the old place, it was very cramped. The tracksaw system helped me a ton by taking the need for the panel saw out of the equation. That saw was very busy in the first few weeks cutting cabinet parts until we could get a CNC up and running. I did run it initially with a cheap shop vac that the company bought, while planning my next purchases. Some of the routers and the Dewalt SCMS were about it until the new space. After the move and accessing my available space, I filled in the gaps that improve efficiency, but aren't actually required. I could do pretty much everything while still in the temp space, but it's so much nicer fully fleshed out.
All in all, yes it's great to have all of that matching brand new stuff, but was a bit of a learning curve with it too, and it didn't all show up at once either, so working it in and adapting was a challenge.
Now, we are about 16 months into the new place, probably about a year with everything in place and fully integrated.
The "law of unintended consequences" only brought up one thing. The beauty of space also brings distance to the forefront. The building is 200' wide and 300' long, with the offices, break room, etc. taking about 40' from one end. That leaves 200x250 of wide open shop. This spreads things out to the point of reducing noise, but it also means everything is further away. The areas that work together are clustered as best as possible, but it's a long way for me to get to the beamsaw or the cnc. Fortunately, I don't have to do it often. The excessiveness of my personal tools/equipment means that I really don't have to leave my area often. Once I get the ribs and top/bottom plates of a big reception desk assembled I go cut the panels or send a cutlist to the main guy in that area. After that point, I'm good for hours, sometimes days on large units.
That's probably way more than you wanted to know, but other than the people who lived through it and already know the story, it's not really interesting to the average person.
