My Hobby Machine Shop

It has occurred to me that I have not done any shop tours, so I will start here with a tour of my little machine shop. My shop layout is always changing, at present I have 3 heated shop areas attached to the house, a large garage/workshop with attached firewood and material storage areas and an outdoor equipment shed. I am in the process of planning some changes to increase my protected shop areas so I can do things like casting and forge work year around.

My little machine shop area is 9' X 14' and when I rebuild and place my 10K South Bend lathe, I will be out of room. I am relatively new to machine work and am learning as I go. My equipment is not expensive, I got a good deal on 2 mini lathes and a mini mill a few years back when the Canadian buck was worth more than the US buck. The big mill/drill is a Busy Bee import, I rebuilt the Walker-Turner drill from a scrap designation and a nice 10K South Bend lathe is still waiting rebuild.

Currently a lot of my surplus and salvaged parts and materials are stored in labeled boxes under the bench. This works ok but material is sometimes hard to find and dust and swarf ends up collecting in the open storage, so plans are in the works to eventually install shelves, drawers and doors.

So here are some pictures of my layout.

When the 10K South Bend lathe rebuild is complete it will take the place of the bench in the picture above. In the picture below is my collection of "Model Engineer" magazines and bound volumes, a couple of years of "Projects In Metal" and 5 years of "The Home Shop Machinist". On the shelf below is over 200 GB of books, manuals, plans and articles on disc.

So thats my little machine shop. Hope you liked the pictures. I am currently doing some painting and reorganizing in my woodwork shop. I'll do a little tour there when I get it all organized.