oh crazy hair hang on adam savage here in my cave
and there
you might watch these videos regularly and wonder to yourself i wonder what it's like to have a shop
like that it's a totally reasonable thing i do the same thing when i watch other people's shop videos
one thing you might not pick up on are some of the great
unfinished projects in this shop for instance this stack here of my ladder of all the
the pliers and nippers and stuff like that it is in sore need of rebuilding
it needs real attention but i haven't gotten to it yet and sometimes that's the way it works in
a shop sometimes something needs attention for a long time you don't get around to it
i mean for specifically for this the the pliers and nippers and scissors one picture i do have
with them is exactly what i use on a daily basis and probably about 30 of this could just go away
just haven't gotten around to the culling the marine condoing of those tools but that's not
the that's not today's one-day build that's not today's uh uh shop infrastructure video
today's shop infrastructure video is about thou wall material storage it's a total [ __ ] fight
and it's almost useless right now i'm out of plywood
seriously i tried i tried to do a project at home this weekend
and i needed some pieces of three-quarter inch plywood that were like two feet long i needed like
three of those pieces just three inches wide three feet long could not find them in here nope it is
all scraps and end cuts so i would like to talk a little bit about material storage because well
to fix this problem so yeah sorry so to fix this problem i bought a whole bunch new uh half inch
plywood and some foam board and i have some sintra on its way in all of this will get this material
storage back up and running but let's talk about material storage because i'm about to shift some
things a little bit here based on usage patterns so in the in the broadest scheme actually hold on
all right see that so uh roughly what we have here is uh over here on the right i've got like
the corrugated cardboard some of the exotic materials like masonite and foam board
and then next to that i've got some acrylic and some aluminum sheet and then the left hand four
are all plywood clearly i've got plenty of quarter inch plywood an eighth inch plywood but i'm
all out of all the other stuff and all the scrap bins they're just all [ __ ] useless right now
i have a lot more metal material i i bought uh like this here the aluminum brass and copper
stock i have a bunch more of that stuff that needs a home so it's going to get one of these
cubbies or make it a cubby above i'm going to pull out all the scraps and i'm going to
throw out a bunch well not throw out i'm going to you know i make these scraps available to my
tested partners and contributors uh we donate them and so there will be a nice amount of of scrappage
but you got to have a threshold with scraps you have to have a threshold you can't save
everything you can't save everything you you have to you you yeah you have to make a call
and what happens is you put that call off and you end up with this after a period
of time it's not i'm not upset about it it's this is a natural course of stuff
i don't even know what that sound was at any rate it's time to rejigger the material wall
this i think this is a definitely time lapse moment because like i've got to tear this
whole shot in order to do this sorry yeah i should explain in order to do this i can't
quite empty the whole thing out and then refill it there's just not enough room i'm standing in
a 400 square foot space um but it still will like render this whole shop unusable for hours
in order to start this process but it's got to be done i think that's all the prep i have for this
i'll check back in when i've got something to add let's set this up on a nice long time lapse
do
it is worth checking in i have made a little bit of progress uh
i want to be clear i still don't have a plan i mean i have a rough plan which is
to get this cleaned up but as far as like the actual plan of where things space out
i do i do think that there is a shift and the shift is this this is a quarter inch mdf medium
density fiberboard uh and truth be told there's a type of mdf called ldf light density fiberboard or
trupan t-r-u-p-a-n that is from my understanding a sustainably grown uh non-formaldehyde binder-based
fiberboard that's like half the weight of normal fiberboard and i used the crap out
of it in the 90s and the early aughts it was like uh terrific modeling materials super lightweight
easy to work with i built tons of shelves out of it they all drooped because fiberboard creeps
and it's time to put away fiberboard that's a building material for me it's
mm-hmm i i have like two whole shelves of it and i have not touched a single piece of fiberboard
in two years uh-huh don't get me wrong i still use this stuff from time to time for little things
that it can fix but as an actual building material here in the cave it's time to give up fiberboard
that feels like that feels significant so i'm gonna pull out all the mdf and ldf that i've got
i'm gonna put in a stack for donations
all right uh still making progress look at this point in a cleanup reorg like this if you feel
like it's going wrong it just means that you're not at the end of it yet it is completely normal
to feel like it's like way still out of control i've thrown out a whole bunch i've made a sort
of king's ransom of small scrap plywood for the tested team and other friends have tested
and i've cleared up a bunch of space i've gotten to know my material shelves a lot better
and it's time to bring in uh about 100 pounds of plywood and a full box of foam board
well
i i can't say that the problem is wholly solved but we've made tremendous strides
here so let's walk you through it over here on the far left we've got some hold on gotta
sneeze there we go over there on the far left here we've got red shape and aluminum
next to that we've got sheet material like non-standard sheet material acrylic warbler abs
etc then in the middle there we've got the plywood three quarter inch half inch eighth inch etc
then there's the foam course and then i actually ended up with a couple of empty chambers up top
i've gotten rid of well i've added some aluminum stock storage up there and the plywood i've got
rid of everything smaller than like an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper for the most part um and
i still i mean i still don't know what's going on over here for the most part but i have discovered
that i have a lot more warbler than i thought i did i have a lot more abs and kydex than i thought
i did uh and i've got a genuine glass mirror in there somewhere i this is a terrific exercise to
figuring out what you have and it's actually it's really pretty important to do like once a year
i yeah i probably do it about once a year um to be fair this is definitely something my
shop assistant has done in the past i haven't done it myself in probably three or four years
but kovit being what it is yeah i'm on my own um i got a lot more space for the hardwoods because
i've been doing more of the woodworking and again i've been more circumspect about what
i keep from that and it feels great um it was weird not having any actual plywood long enough
to make a thing it's been a long time since i let it get that low um but there you go look it is
shop organization is such a constant subject and one of the problems with the subject is that it is
often discussed as a set of problems and solutions which it is but don't make the mistake of thinking
that when you implement a solution your problem is solved because it is only solved for now this is
i was watching uh i was watching a buddhist teacher talk about leading a retreat
and they had led a group of people on a week-long silent retreat
which i have not done i i aspire to do one at some point i want to do one what she said is when you
lead a week-long retreat people like have all sorts of incredible awakenings and openings and
they just they feel totally differently at the end of the week and they go to her and they say
how do we integrate back into our normal lives and she says i don't know i don't have an answer
for you it's not a problem you can solve it is a it is a paradox to manage and that is also what
a shop is it is not a problem to solve it is a it is a set of paradoxes and it is a process
um and then that like that little shift of like i'm never going to achieve
the solution for storage because i am a changing i'm a learning computer uh i i
my proclivities and my biases and my preferences change over time and so must my storage situations
and sometimes you have to wait until you have a point of view on what is important
sometimes it's just like too much of a [ __ ] fight you gotta take care of it
sometimes you gotta wait until the inspiration for what the replacement is shows up in your head yeah
thanks for joining me for this part of my shop process it's been a pleasure if you'll excuse
me i'm gonna get back to work thank you guys for joining me peace out and i'll see you next time