More chat about sheds

1. Any rain that hits the shed will run down its walls, drip onto the ground and splash upwards. This is much worse when no gutters are fitted. It is best that there is at least 9" between the bottom of the walls and the ground.

2. When you start to work in a shed in winter, even with a fire on, your feet will get cold. Its best to install under floor insulation at build time. It can be done later but is a tediuos job - best to be avoided.

3. You have your new shed again insulate it , I use 4" glass fibre - you can get some really good deals, courtesy of Electric companies. The walls will need lining, don''t use plasterboard, its rubbish. 1/2" OSB is a good compromise between price and strength. The ceiling can be lined with hardboard, fixed with 16mm X 4mm screws every 12" or so into the original frame with some extra nogging put in, just to use up the 1.2m width,

4. PAINT IT ALL WHITE, because as soon as you move your kit in, put up shelves. . It just won''t happen. Look for bent tins at market stalls/clearance shops etc. You don''t need a colour co-ordinated interior.

5. Run your electrics from a non-RCD fuse in the fuse box and put a proper RCD protected box in the shed.

6. The jaws of your vise on the workbench, should be level with your elbows!!! and slightly stick out forward of the bench edge. It seems high, I am 6'' 2" and my bench is 42" high, looks high but works very well. I will need a high stool for it when I get too old to stand up though. Also on this subject I find that bottom of shed windows should be 6" above the bench surface, so shoving something big on to the bench does not result in something else going through the glass. Also a handy place for a pot with your pencils/markers/scribers in. A cheap work bench is made of second hand 4" X 2", side by side then surfaced with hardboard. It is good practise to mount the vise over a leg, I extend this and say a leg that is fitted to a piece of chipboard, so as to keep the leg upright, else the vise, bench and shed wall will "rack" when you start to use a hacksaw with some enthusiasm.

7. I put my 1000Kg milling machine on a 1m X 1m X 4mm spreader plate, it worked well in my last shed for 10 years.

Frank

Charlie, I used a sort of wax based preservative on my last shed and it lasted extremely well, only re-coated once in 28 years. Of course I can not find it now so I have bought some similar stuff from Wickes (other supplier are available ). I'll let you know how it went in ten years time.

Frank

Edited By Phil P on 07/01/2012 14:57:46

For you who are ambitous enough to retrofit under floor insulation here how I did mine.

The bearers were up to 2" of being square to the axis of the shed ! so measurements tended to be "average". The basic system was to wrap glass fibre in in plastic and pulling it into each void between the bearers. So you need 4" thick glassfibre for the area involved, A piece of rope at least two shed widths in length. The plastic wrapper I used was green plastic VCL (vapour control layer), this is 300 gauge and is easier to use and cheaper then the 1000 gauge used for damp proof courses, you will need about the shed area plus 30% or so. the only other thing I bought was "gorilla" tape, 2" wide and REALLY sticky, masking tape just won't do. So I cut the glassfibre to a suitable shape for the first void. Then a piece of the VCL the same shape and another piece of the VCL which was the same shape plus twice the height of the bearers. The reason for not just wrapping the glass fibre was the possibility of rainwater getting and some way of letting it out has to be sought. The correct sized VCL was laid down, then the glass fibre put on it, then the top piece of VCL laid on top and its edges were then taped to the bottom piece. At the same time one end of the bundle had the VCL edges turned in towards the centre and held with more tape, think will this bundle be able to slip in between rough concrete and wood without catching. Get your piece of rope right under the shed with one half of it out of the "feeding" end, lay the bundle on it the right way up! and at the pointy end, using the "Gorilla" tape tape the rope to the bottom VCL of the bundle. Now pull it through, trying to keep the bundle laying on the rope. When it appears at the far side, pull/cut the tape off and withdraw the rope. Fill the two ends with insulation foam (recovered from a skip!). the reason for this procedure is that because the widths of the voids are all different hard foam would not go in and glass fibre can not be pulled at all or pushed into such a deep cavity. its a tedious job I only manged 2 voids a day (due to boredom) Frank

Gordon, I extended my last shed, really its like building a same section shed up against one end, leaving a centre post in to support the end of the roof. Re-cover the roof as one item. I extended a 12' X 8' to a 16 X 8 when a "new" milling machine followed me home. The narrow part (the extension), I shifted everything along the back of the shed to get the mill in the old part. I left the old bench up to the old roof post with storage shelves one the "new" end wall behind it.

Frank

Thanks chaps! you have all made me feel so inadequate..............

We, the underendowed, have only one thing left to give us comfort.

We have to rely on the old saying 'It isn't what you have got, but how you use it, that counts'

Ok! OK! I know! - size matters, bigger is better, but we can kid ourselves otherwise, makes us feel so much better (doesn't really, does it?)

Yes , but bigger than what? Theres a nice big factory being built near our town, their little shedcovers an area of about 4 footy fields, its massive, the floor should be Ok too, its designed for 80 tonne per axle on the fork lifts, and straddle carriers they will be using, later in the year they start on part two, its quite a bit bigger! The engineering shop is built in comparisment, I'd love to have a go at that, I'm sure I could find a corner, and no one would notice me at all. But then again, good work can come from a workshop not much more than a cupboard. Ian S C

I installed a workshop/shed 35 years ago, and remember paying extra for Tanalised tongue-and-groove timber, which is pressure treated with an anti-rot compound. At the time it was guaranteed against rot for 25 years. It seems to have been money well spent. I no longer own either the house or the shed, but in as much as I can tell from pictures on Google Earth there still isn't a trace of rot. My memories of the building process include mixing over three and a half tons of concrete for the base with a shovel (too stingy to hire a mixer!). A solid base is all-important for machine tools, although the bits where you stand do need insulating or you'll freeze your toes in winter. A steeply pitched roof is less likely to leak than a flat one, and provides some useful overhead storage space.