Organise the workshop

One of the exciting things about planning my new workshop is to have a place for everything, so I do not have to hunt through loads of boxes and move things about to find what I needed.

I want the materials and the tools to be easily accessible. My commonly used tools are all on the walls, using Bott wall boards. These have been brilliant.

For everything else, I've been through an evolution of various ideas, starting with shelves, movable shelf units and finally movable drawer units and roller cabinets.

I find that shadowfoam works well for some tools but to compliment that the latest improvement is to add custom 3D printed trays to fit each of the drawers and the tools or stock within them.

Not everything lends itself to being completely organised but much of what I use regular, does.

I've opted for the very popular Gridfinity system. This uses a 3D printed grid that aligns all the trays and makes it easy to swap things round. There are loads of articles and YouTube videos going into detail about using Gridfinity, so I won't repeat that.

I've designed a lot of my own custom trays to fit the exact tools that I have as efficiently as possible. The photos give a good idea of the solutions I've used.

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16mm tools in the WM250V lathe

I have just taken the first couple of cuts with 16mm tooling in my Warco WM250V lathe.

These have been the best I have ever had. The tool easily removed more metal in one go than I was comfortable doing before, and without trying, the surface finish is better than I have had before. 

The photo shows what was supposed to be a roughing cut. Better than any of my previous tools.

The WM250V is intended to take a maximum of 12mm tooling, which is what I have been using up until now.

The reason I tried this is that I had noticed that the T51 quick change tool post I have was just large enough to fit 16mm tooling and I took a chance that there was enough height adjustment to centre a 16mm tool. I had already replaced some of the tool holders with longer M8 grub screws to be able to centre and lock the 12mm tooling reliably. Those same M8x40mm grub screws gave me enough movement to adjust the 16mm tooling.

It's a bit close with the bottom edge, having only about 0.5mm movement left, but, as they say, "clearance is clearance."

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