New Container Layout

General
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As many of you may have noticed, we have a new container layout and we have access, hooray!

At the moment the containers are full of stuff and we need to set aside a working bee or two to start rearranging everything. To that end, a bunch of us (Exec, team leads, anyone with a vested interest) have been talking about layout and usage. The plan at this stage is here (nothing is to scale, i just knocked this up quick):

containers
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To go into some details:

Overall Plan

Boiler Room

For the extractor and the compressor. if we end up needing to store other large loud machines that can be remote, we will find space here or expand it.

Automotive

This is pending automotive forming a team and taking this on, otherwise we will repurpose. But the idea is that we have 2 roller doors to put in the side of the container to open up this space and the one adjacent. If we put automotive here, they can have a covered workspace for storage, workbenches, etc. It means that the concrete pad will become a defacto automotive work area. We might try and shade the area with shade sail? or perhaps pursue a grant to get a custom ‘carport’ cover for the area. depends on what people want to do.

Hot works

Kiln! pottery stuff :slight_smile: Heat treat ovens, heat treat kilns for forge, maybe the vacuformer depending on what happens with craft punks dirty room.

Painting

A dedicated area for painting. No hard plans for exactly how it will work so if you’re keen to jump in and make a plan that would be appreciated. We need to make sure its got a ‘work’ area and a small storage area while things dry. good ventillation etc.

Cold Storage & Forge Storage

Cold storage will be for all the things we need to keep but dont need common access to. Like all the lights we replaced that will have to be returned if we leave. Or the dishwashers until we have time/effort/money to redo our kitchen. Spare insulation material. That sort of thing.

Forge Storage is as indicated by @Wixted , mainly just for storing refractory and other weather sensitive consumables. He said half a container is plenty for them.

Forge

The whacky whacky hot hot area as you know and love it, just bigger and better.

Storage

We have a need to store 3 types of things: Long Things, Sheet Things, and Misc Things

Members Storage

For midsize/large projects. The racks for peoples long material. Some kind of storage in the container for sheet goods. Maybe racks/shelves for other items. The racks under the dome are for people to put all their project on a pallet and store it there, again for midsize to large projects. We are providing this space with the understanding that this will mean absolutely no storage in the work areas at all for materials, projects, etc. Work areas for work, storage areas for storage.

Boneyard Storage

Again, we want to put long things on the racks, sheet goods in the container, and some kind of shelving system in the container. We are going to be extremely strict on what can go in the boneyard. The core idea is ‘usable materials only’. So having boxes where you can put a motor, or a psu is the thinking. No ewaste with ‘good parts’ to be disassembled. No printers with motors, either in the ewaste bin or remove the motors and put them and only them in the boneyard.

The shops may maintain sort of ‘local boneyard caches’, like the woodshop has the trolley, metalshop has the scrap metal bin (to be revisited), so it will be a regular thing to empty them to the bigger boneyard and to trim and cull anything not worth keeping.

Power

Currently we have a plan to supply power to the 2 points we installed on the outside of the woodshop. Just waiting on hearing back from CBRE. We should get 80-100a supply for the area that we will build our own sub boards for.

What next?

Sigh, with covid, hard to say. We need to have a working bee soon to just empty out all the containers and do a big reorganisation as per the plan above. We need to sort the power, put up lights in the dome, modify the 40’ to have roller doors in the side, install lighting in all the containers so they’re usable at night. Led panels perhaps? We can use spare fluros until we get something better.

Todo, in no particular order:

  • Empty containers and reorganise
  • Lights in the dome
  • Lights in the containers
  • Put roller doors in 40’ container
  • Install internal walls in 40’ container
  • Put up racking for members storage
  • Get power connected
  • Build subboards to supply power to everything
  • Move the forge stuff out to the forge (powerhammer)
  • Move the kiln etc to hotworks
  • Figure out what these containers look like internally (layout etc):
    • Paint
    • Cold Storage/Forge
    • Members/Boneyard Storage.
      • Need to figure out a sheet goods storage thats space efficient. some kind of 2 layer comb?
  • Probably a bunch of stuff i’m forgetting.

So lets perhaps set a date for reorganising the contents of the containers and go from there? Hard to set a date with lockdowns etc. Tentatively, weekend of 14th/15th August?

Keen for everyones help and input and figuring out how we can get all this done. Really keen to knock it out over a month or two and keep on trucking, dont want this to become a drawn out project (any more than it already is). Getting to 80% by the time the construction finishes mid september would be ideal.

This should be a big win for everyones usage of the space, more dedicated workshop areas, better storage, should be awesome!

2 Likes
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Thankyou to everyone who came along for the working bee today! Big success.

Big thankyou to Jess, Eris, Murray, Ryan, Jarrod, Duncan, Chris, Zac, Broseo, Jacques.

We made some big achievements:

  • Emptied out the 40’ container so its ready to be modified with roller doors and internal walls.
  • All the material that was stored in containers has been organised, culled etc.
  • The long material racks are in their home! Eris and Jess painted half of them red to indicate ‘boneyard’ materials, and the blue racks are for members/space storage.
  • Cold storage was setup, and we moved all the items in there that made sense to do so, which has cleared up space in the green room.
  • Broseo sorted out all the roof tiles from the pallet and salvaged what we could, and skipped the rest. Huge help.
  • Chris modified some of the racks in a really smart way (thanks duncan) to make them all fit correctly.
  • Jacques and Jarred disassembled all the halfcut rack uprights, and Chris and Ryan reassembled a few into full uprights.
  • So much more. Just a big sort through and reorganise thats badly needed.

Whats next

  • I need to get cbre to give us access to the new container, its padlocked.
  • We need more rack uprights reassembled, they are in the cold storage area. Duncan and Jarred who have offered to do some more during the week, this would help a bunch. We have what we need to put racking in the containers, but need uprights to do members storage under the dome, which will be at least 4 uprights. Another 2 would let us put the second cold storage rack in. Trying to not have to spend money on more racking.
  • Need to figure out what steel we need to be able to do the doors on the 40’, and organise a few of us to do that job.
  • Once the under-dome members storage is available, the motorbikes and projects on pallets that are in a container atm will go there, freeing that space.
  • We need to design sheet material storage for the containers. Theres some ideas being discussed between @Ryan2 and myself so hit us up if you have ideas.

Order of operations:

Stream 1:

  1. Under dome members storage racks done
  2. Boneyard container emptied and items moved to under dome storage
    2.5. Sheet goods storage installed in boneyard container
  3. Racks in and materials from forge storage moved to boneyard container
  4. Forge area is free, move all forge items to there.

Stream 2:

  1. Get access to members storage container
  2. Put in racks
    2.5. Put in sheet storage
  3. Make available for use.

Stream 3:

  1. Plan roller door locations
  2. Get budget for steel and wall framing
  3. and order steel
  4. Cut holes, weld in steel, mount roller doors.
    4.5. Use excess material to close holes made previously in container.
  5. Frame in some internal walls.

Other stuff

I have to follow up on the builder getting us some of the paint for the containers so we can patch em up.

I’m still chasing the power plan stuff. its complicated by the fact we are at the limit of supply. Once its resolved up stream, we will run some subboards off the 2 50a sockets and this will supply the area with power. In the meantime, if someone wants to organise getting the lights up in the dome etc, that would be good.

Once we have power sorted, we can move things like kilns etc.

Longer term

We need someone to look at setting up a paint area.

Automotives area is dependent on automotive continuing to exist as a team, which is indeterminate at this point. So this may get repurposed.

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To summarise, jobs that people can do this week that dont require coordination:

  1. Take all the culled sheet material to the tip. its outside the boneyard container.
  2. Assemble uprights for the racking.
  3. Install lights in dome.
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Please note some of this is very new and current, but some things are outdated . The forge area in particular has its storage area already, lights installed and power hammer power already, but those are temporarily installed. If nobody steps up to run an automotive area, it will be a painting room. If you hate the idea of a hot works area, speak now, or come the end of my term as VP I’m going to build it and start a team based around it.
We need the input of many members for both ideas, and a general feeling as to what members will use. Why build a pottery Kiln and heat treating room if nobody wants to use it? I’ll build and use it , but I would prefer interested people who also wanted to use it…

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I am just a new member, but I would really appreciate the automotive bit staying on. Some dedicated automotive workbenches would be great!

I wouldn’t mind stepping up to work on the automotive area but my only concern is how it is going to work in practice. From what I have seen members use the automotive tools to do maintenance and repairs, and not that many projects (except the EV bike afaik). So getting members to volunteer so somebody can do basic repairs (because larger projects sitting for several days is 'frowned upon") would be rather difficult?

I definitely will volunteer for an automotive team. I will follow this up by posting in the automotive forum.

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Just to clarify, we haven’t made this change.

As it currently stands:

  • We are waiting to get access to the members storage container so we can set it up, this has been asked of cbre a few times now. This is preventing us shuffling everything around towers of hanoi style.
  • The painting container is still full of forge and automotive assets because of this
  • The cold storage section needs to be rearranged/packed properly, it a bit of a mess. Its also full of sheet goods that are waiting on us having the funds to buy the sheet storage racks.
  • We have a design by @White to setup the paint container once its free.
  • The middle section of the 40’ can still be an automotive area, if people step up (Hi @Raf), it hasn’t been repurposed for paint or anything.
  • The end section is definitely going to be hot works, the kiln, vacuformer and oven have all been moved there by @Ryan2 already. We just have to cut the second door in.
  • The boiler room is waiting on the woodshop team @Ale_More and @Ryan2 to move the dust extraction into final position, so we can move the compressor into final position. Also getting the power distribution boards setup. I believe the storage the woodshop currently needs for the assets they plan to sell will be the middle area for the short term.

It would be cool to have some people step up to manage the following areas. We have some people nominally at the moment it seems but need to start thinking longer term once the areas are running rather than being built.

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@devians what do u need the woodshop team to do? Do u know what’s the final position for the dust collector?

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I replied on discord but i’ll repeat myself here for other readers :slight_smile:

Just organising the assets, selling them if possible to clear space. need to shuffle things around so we can put the extractor and compressor in final location, as indicated on the map. so the extractor will be just inside the container doors and the compressor behind it, and we will probably mount those distribution boxes on the wall under the hole where the extraction enters. (to be determined still).

So getting the boiler room area free of stuff and any assets into the far end of the container or elsewhere, moving the extractor into position are the things to do. once thats done, we can move the compressor.

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What’s the go with the members storage container? I’m happy to get that container working as a storage since i dont have a proper answer for people who wants to store their project at the space.

Who has the key to access it? Is there in charge of doing this?

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I have been repeatedly asking CBRE to resolve access to this container, and I’ve asked EDQ directly as well. We asked them again as recently as the meeting on 08/02 and they are ‘going to look into it’ again.

I’m as frustrated as you by it, if it wasnt locked we would have rearranged everything long ago. As soon as i get access I’ll arrange a working bee to shift stuff around.

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What happen if we just cut the lock?

Would this be viable or there’s stuff that’s not ours inside?

Do we have our stuff inside? Is the container inside of the contract lease? Im just saying, probably they don’t even know about the container or the lock, so maybe we can just cut the lock?

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No idea. Could be nothing, could be a big deal and we get evicted for breaking and entering. I have no way to know.

I don’t know whats inside, or why it has a lock. They have made noises about ‘the builders having stuff in there’ but i think they dont know either.

No

What lease?
The last meeting they had one of the points they raised was they had to find the paperwork to prove the container was even ours. Sandra said she had it so we’re just waiting on them to figure it out.

Its in minuted notes with our meetings with them, so while they forget continually about everything, theres always paper trail.

I feel you, the person from edq was (verbally, at a networking function, informally) like ‘just cut off the lock?’ but a) shes a temp person standing in with nfi, b) we have been threatened on the lease over similarly minor issues, and i’m not willing to do it until i get it in writing from them.