Shop Upgrades!




As requested here are the inside pictures of the shop which is going to see more work tomorrow.

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Ah man! Looking great so far! Already got tools in it!
That looks so fun! Thanks for posting this!

How long has it taken to get to this point?

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If you include the root taking of the backyard I have been working this funds pending for 18 months give or take 2.

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Oh Man! (panting)
So good! Got your electrical all laid out, and you lie in the bed at night blinking at the ceiling.
Enjoy, and do it right. The pain of the expenditure will pass - and then… Oh yeah baby.
That’s what I tell the mirror anyway.

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Yeah if look I have double gang boxes all along the wall with two boxes of 10-2 clad wire per 20amp breaker not including the floor outlets which is a single gang 20amp socket and one 220 volt 20amp socket to power the bandsaw

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I purchased a set of these shelves today at Costco and have them setup, ready and waiting for a GF to arrive. Thanks for sharing the information about the shelves. I think they are going to work great as they are very stable and the price was very reasonable. Still need to do a little electrical improvement in this 60+ year old house, no ground, but that will not be hard to solve. The main electrical panel was replace a few years ago, so I’m good from that point.

The shelf is setup in front of a window. The next project will be to build a 4" duct into some type of material to put in the window for the exhaust. I know there are lots of great ideas already posted here for the community, just need to pick a design and get it done.

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I have always wondered how that works because in the UK three pin sockets with ground have been mandatory all my life.

If you have, say, a computer with the normal mains filter with Y capacitors between line and ground then the case become live if you don’t connect the ground. There isn’t much current but you get a shock if you touch it. How do you use modern devices in a house with no ground?

yeah, i’ve definitely noticed that if i use a two-prong adapter (keep in mind this is north america) with one of two different laptops, you can feel the charge in the casing of the machine itself. it’s extremely strange (and this is at 110/120).

My home has been partially renovated so there are grounded outlets in some parts of the house, but not throughout the entire house. For the most part this is no big deal, almost everything these days uses just two wires, such as lamps, clock radios, cell phone chargers … You’re right in that I need to know what I’m plugging in, but in general this really is not a problem.

The room I have chosen to locate the Glowforge in does not have grounded outlets even though the main circuit breaker panel does. The good news for me is the room is on the first floor of the house, so I just need to run a ground wire across the basement and up the wall into the electrical box and change the outlet.

Yes anything with a switch mode supply needs some capacitance to ground on the output to pass EMC regulations. All laptops here have three pin mains connections. They would all give a belt if that wasn’t connected but it would be half the mains voltage so about 120V. Half of your mains voltage would only give a tingle.

correct.

all the laptops here ship with three-prong cords, too, but they’re generally removable.

Well, my quick project to add a ground line to the outlet where I plan to locate my GF turned out not to be a quick project :frowning: It took me most of the day yesterday to add the ground to this outlet.

While the outlet was physically close to a grounding point (a copper water line) there was no way to push a wire or fish tape up or down the wall to or from the basement. This was due to there being two old wires (cloth covered and sticky) already in the holes and there were actually multiple holes inside the wall. Eventually, I ended up cutting the old metal electrical box out of the wall. This allowed my to reach down in the wall and pull the stable that was holding the old wires. Once this was done, I was able to tape a new romex wire to one of the old wires and pull it to the basement. With this new wire in place I was also able to pull the other wire to the basement. A new junction box was added in the basement to connect all of the wires with a new ground line added :slight_smile: and a new receptacle box added in the room where the GF will go with a new grounded outlet.

Way more work than I was planning for this project, but now it’s done right.

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OOL, but really appreciate hearing how you got this done.

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Unfortunately, while I was working on this issue I found two more electrical problems that still need to be fixed. The fun of owning an old house.

Also have to replace the hot water heater today as it started leaking badly yesterday morning.

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I haven’t seen cloth covered wire since the first time I met my mothering law to be 25 years ago! She asked me to look at why the garage light didn’t work, she said she thought “it might be the bulb”. It didn’t work because the house had been rewired some years before but not the garage, so it wasn’t even connected! I ended up rewiring the whole garage as the old wiring was cloth covered rubber in metal conduits.

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My first house was era 1911 and electrical was cobbled onto the baseboards sometime in the '30s based on the silk fabric insulation. The tan silk has a blue decorative pattern woven into it.
Trying to figure out the amp capacity, looking at the old filthy porcelain base of the knife switch main breaker, I found a ‘25’ cast into it.
That’s right, 25 amp service with 4 circuits protected by the screw-in glass fuses.[quote=“Just-Maken-It, post:69, topic:6255”]
It took me most of the day yesterday
[/quote]

I feel your pain. Spent a weekend snaking a coax from the attic HD antenna to the theater in the walkout basement of the new house. Used a hole saw to open the sheetrock so I could drill the sill plate between floors, easy patch.

You did that right with the junction box. I learned that the hard way.

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We had knob and tube wiring in our 1910 house. BUT, someone spliced new romex onto it to make it look like new wiring in the basement. We had an electrician come look at it before we bought it. He found a cut, live wire sitting on insulation with no electrical tape or anything on it. Not to mention the burn marks in some of the junction boxes.

We re-wired the whole house.

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You guys make me feel so much better about the creativity I found in my house. I grew up in a 1912 farmhouse; but that electrical mess was my dad’s to sort out. My house was built in 1972, so they had to at least use modern parts to be stupid, and I was dealing with fewer “electricians” between installation and me.

No matter how “creative” the builder, there’s always an example of worse malfeasance.

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Metal conduits - oooooh a fancy house. Most of the electrical in my house has been upgraded over the years, but I still find cloth covered wires, no conduit. No cloth wires running into the electrical panel, or exposed in the basement, or in any outer wall, just in unknown spots of the interior walls. At least I have hardwired smoke detectors. I’ll also have broken ankles if I have to exit from the second story.

We found a prescription bottle dated 1905 in a wall during a renovation. The pharmacy that issued it is still in business at the same location.

My most amazing find was in a wall in what is now a closet. It is a beautiful piece of joinery. Three short boards joined at the ends to make about a four foot length of structural 2"x4" (actual dimensions, this is an old house after all.) Considering the time it took to join three pieces of scrap into a longer piece of scrap, versus walking the five blocks to where a lumberyard was located at the time, I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

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Kitchen remodel and was tearing out the lino floor. Lost a day reading the 30’s era newspapers I found spread underneath!

Removing the wallpaper was a great too. 12 layers back to the original that reminded me of a hotel room in ‘Gunsmoke’.

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