In April I rearranged the basement/garage/workshop to have a second office and to put our 100w CO2 laser on a real chimney. These moves consumed my clean workshop space for drawing, crafts, and electronics.
All of the storage bins for small parts got put onto carts on wheels, it was impossible to find anything quickly and without any desk space (and with one-now-two kiddos) it meant that it was pretty difficult to work on that type of thing. This lack of space and time to work on things I used to love was really weighing me down emotionally.
This week I got it back! I merged my desk with some wall space and a couple more small tables, and I put french cleats on the walls and adjacent rolling shelves and tables. This was super easy with pre-finished 3/4 plywood and a table saw. All the french cleats took a couple of hours.
I have been super happy to have everything on casters that's on the floor, and now I have casters for the walls!
The whole workspace is cubicle-shaped and it's near enough to my desk that I don't think I'll ever need to put a laptop on the workbench to do embedded work.
Next up was mounting the small parts storage on the cleats, and that was also super smooth. I wanted enough cleats to cover all the small parts and to leave plenty of workspace cleats too.
I have just started building the custom doo-dads and tool holders for the near-bench storage. So far I have:
A screwdriver rack: Custom build to hold 21 drivers. A full set of philips and slot, and a few others that I use pretty regularly.
A solder station: Just a glued box
Several akro-bins adapters
Canister Clamps:
One canister for pens and pencils, one for pliers-like things, and one for the multimeter
Spool Holder: I'm happy about this but it could be much better.
Lessons about french cleats:
Bonus: A small parts bin for the kiddo, full of bubbles, a slinky, cotton balls, etc. All the stuff that is fit for a toddler.
24th January 2021
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I'm Issac. I live in Oakland. I make things for fun and money. I use electronics and computers and software. I manage teams and projects top to bottom. I've worked as a consultant, software engineer, hardware designer, artist, technology director and team lead. I do occasional fabrication in wood and plastic and metal. I run a boutique interactive agency with my brother Kasey and a roving cast of experts at Kelly Creative Tech. I was the Director of Technology for Nonchalance during the The Latitude Society project. I was the Lead Web Developer and then Technical Marketing Engineer at Nebula, which made an OpenStack Appliance. I've been building things on the web and in person since leaving Ohio State University's Electrical and Computer engineering program in 2007. Lots of other really dorky things happened to me before that, like dropping out of high school to go to university, getting an Eagle Scout award, and getting 6th in a state-wide algebra competition. I have an affinity for hopscotch.