Building a new workshop / lab

[StubbornGreek]

I'm enjoying the 'from scratch' build, thanks for posting updates as often as you've been.

FYI, as far as saw blades go, I've found that sometimes blades get gummed up with glue, resin, rosin, etc. and seem dull. You can usually save these by soaking them in Easy-Off (oven cleaner) for a few hours and finally scrubbing with a stiff brush - especially the carbide type (these are tough to kill).

[SeanB]

Well most of the boards Warren is using are actually damaged IKEA funiture, slice and dice to fit. Going to be hard on any blade other than a carbide tipped one. The blades are cheap though, the 115mm carbide tipped blades are around $15 retail here. What kills them are buried nails and screws.

[Monkeh]

Well most of the boards Warren is using are actually damaged IKEA funiture, slice and dice to fit. Going to be hard on any blade other than a carbide tipped one. The blades are cheap though, the 115mm carbide tipped blades are around $15 retail here. What kills them are buried nails and screws.

115mm? That's a toy. Nails and screws won't bother a proper blade, either.

[SeanB]

Plenty enough for most light wood and metal work. Portable and easy to carry up a ladder to trim the top of a wall or in a roof.

[Kibi]

This blade is a TCT one, but it has done a lot of work in it's lifetime. I've noticed its performance was not as good recently, but cutting the worktops proved that it is dead. I was left with a very untidy cut on the top (which was face down for cutting).
I have inspected the teeth with a loupe and they are horrid. Time for a new blade.

[Monkeh]

Plenty enough for most light wood and metal work. Portable and easy to carry up a ladder to trim the top of a wall or in a roof.

Perhaps. Sort of falls short when you've got 50mm block worktop to cut, though.

This blade is a TCT one, but it has done a lot of work in it's lifetime. I've noticed its performance was not as good recently, but cutting the worktops proved that it is dead. I was left with a very untidy cut on the top (which was face down for cutting).
I have inspected the teeth with a loupe and they are horrid. Time for a new blade.

If it's a decent blade you can get new teeth fitted for less than the cost of a new one.

However, if it's a cheapo blade, go buy a nice Dewalt one (there are better, but Dewalt are both easy to find and affordable).

[SeanB]

Drywall screws I buy are pretty hard, they chip carbide blades. I found an old buried nail in a board by the sound it made, and saw the tiny chip it left in the one blade tip.

[Kibi]

I managed to get hold of a Bosch blade for a fiver on ebay. 

[Monkeh]

Drywall screws I buy are pretty hard, they chip carbide blades. I found an old buried nail in a board by the sound it made, and saw the tiny chip it left in the one blade tip.

Your blades aren't up to scratch

I use a 40t Dewalt blade in my saw. 190mm. It will quite happily run through everything from a 3mm screw to a 10mm bolt so long as you're not throwing the saw through like a lunatic (not much point in a 40t blade if you push it through!).

[SeanB]

It came with the Skil saw. Lasted me 10 years, and still in use, so can't be all that bad. I do not do much work with it though, but it is used a lot more than the jigsaw.

[robrenz]

IMHO
No carbide circular saw blade designed for cutting wood is unaffected by cutting through soft steel or case hardened drywall screws. It may seem to do just fine but the actual sharpness of the cutting edge has taken a hit.  The cutting edge geometry and carbide type that is ideal for cutting wood cleanly, is at odds with the geometry and carbide type that would work well for cutting steel.  Even if the cutting edge geometry and carbide grade was optimized for cutting ferrous metals the surface speed of the cutting edge of a circular saw designed for wood is way too fast for optimum life in ferrous metals.

Edit:  Sorry for helping this thread get off Topic

[Monkeh]

IMHO
No carbide circular saw blade designed for cutting wood is unaffected by cutting through soft steel or case hardened drywall screws. It may seem to do just fine but the actual sharpness of the cutting edge has taken a hit.  The cutting edge geometry and carbide type that is ideal for cutting wood cleanly, is at odds with the geometry and carbide type that would work well for cutting steel.  Even if the cutting edge geometry and carbide grade was optimized for cutting ferrous metals the surface speed of the cutting edge of a circular saw designed for wood is way too fast for optimum life in ferrous metals.

Edit:  Sorry for helping this thread get off Topic

I suppose you have a point, but there are ranges of blades designed to take less damage from hitting metals. My primary blade is from such a range. If you go slowly the damage potential is reduced (so many people just ram their saws through things).

I suppose this is sort of off-topic, but the topic will rapidly return when there are MORE PICTURES!

[Kibi]

The lack of tools and materials at this particular stage of the actual project has prompted me to get on with a side project which is still kind of related and should sate the appetite of those hungry for pictures.
I need to get data down to the workshop. I have various subnets in the house which might be useful, so I am running a fibre link. I have gone for fibre because of it's immunity to noise from the mains cable which runs in parallel to it for quite some distance. Also, my current equipment supports mini-GBIC's.
The project right now is to get a new router going. My current router is absolutely fantastic. It's a Nokia IP330 gateway hacked to run pfSense (BSD based router application). It's been running for almost 5 years now and has never crashed, ever. Unfortunately, it's 450MHz AMD K6 cannot cope with the steadily increasing bandwidth. It can route traffic at about 35Mb/s, but the ISP is now supplying 100Mb/s downstream, so it has to be upgraded.
Here I am building another pfSense box on an old (2004) Dell PowerEdge 750 1U server with a 2.8GHz P4 CPU and an eye watering 1GB of memory, more than enough horsepower. Also the hardware in the Dell supports actual vLAN's. I am also configuring the switch with all the correct vLANs to pass down the fibre trunk link between the data cabinet in the house down to the workshop.

I apologise that it's only loosely related to the overall project, but it's what I'm up to at the moment.

[SeanB]

Nice, my router will support every ADSL rate available in SA, and will still do so even if I drop the CPU clock down to 5MHz from the current 33MHz it has. Still spends around 99% of the time in an idle loop.

[T4P]

I just got my internet upgraded from a hybrid coaxial 16mbps to 100mbps fiber ... ( My ISP gave me a VoIP 'N' router made by Gigabyte which sadly sucks balls )
Looking around at the routers i had/used to use:

2nd : TP-Link TL-WR1043ND with a Atheros AR9132@400MHz    32MB Flash
1st 'N' router: Aztech HW-550-3G with a MIPS24KEc V4.12 384 MHz 32MB Flash

And my latest? But most stable. Horrible brand it might be but at least it a few times more stable than the speed demon at the top
Linksys E1500 with a Broadcom BCM5357B0@300MHz 32MB Flash

It feels like a massive downgrade but it's a helluva more stable

[Kibi]

Personally, I have never been able to get my head around those plastic routers. I understand the concept, ease of installation and friendly looking, but they have never been able to do it for me. The bandwidths available these days and the way people use the internet these days, they just can't cope. Their feature set is pretty limited too.

[T4P]

Personally, I have never been able to get my head around those plastic routers. I understand the concept, ease of installation and friendly looking, but they have never been able to do it for me. The bandwidths available these days and the way people use the internet these days, they just can't cope. Their feature set is pretty limited too.

I would take a Celeron/P4 1U Rack over these sad pieces of shit!

[IanB]

Personally, I have never been able to get my head around those plastic routers. I understand the concept, ease of installation and friendly looking, but they have never been able to do it for me. The bandwidths available these days and the way people use the internet these days, they just can't cope. Their feature set is pretty limited too.

I dunno, what are you running at home that requires all that network infrastructure described and pictured in your previous post? It seems tremendously geeky, but I can't get my head round what you need it for.

At home a have a computer (or two), an Internet connection, and I connect and I download stuff. I experience more bottlenecks upstream and on remote servers than I experience inside the walls of my house. I have no idea why I would need a big, noisy, power hungry box instead of a little Linksys router.

[Monkeh]

Personally, I have never been able to get my head around those plastic routers. I understand the concept, ease of installation and friendly looking, but they have never been able to do it for me. The bandwidths available these days and the way people use the internet these days, they just can't cope. Their feature set is pretty limited too.

I dunno, what are you running at home that requires all that network infrastructure described and pictured in your previous post? It seems tremendously geeky, but I can't get my head round what you need it for.

At home a have a computer (or two), an Internet connection, and I connect and I download stuff. I experience more bottlenecks upstream and on remote servers than I experience inside the walls of my house. I have no idea why I would need a big, noisy, power hungry box instead of a little Linksys router.

Your internet requirements are undemanding.

Personally, I require low latency, high throughput, the ability to handle many thousands of open connections at once, and the freedom to manipulate my traffic as I see fit, not as Linksys/D-Link/Netgear/next bunch of incompetents from Taiwan see fit.

Oh, and working IPv6 is a nice bonus they've yet to reliably wrap their collective heads around.

[Kibi]

As I explained, the high bandwidth needs a lot of CPU power to route correctly. The extra power can be used to implement certain useful tunnelling protocols. Plastic routers just don't have the silicon to route effectively at high bandwidths. Most plastic routers don't support more than one subnet either, e.g. I don't quite like the idea of my wireless network being on the same subnet as my normal home computers or servers.. Even good WiFi encryption can be hacked from the street in quick time. The IP telephony works better on it's own subnet too.
I found the Dell in a bin, it works and is perfectly suited to the role.

[IanB]

...my normal home computers or servers...

But see, there is nothing "normal" about your requirements or situation. You are way out there in edge case land 

[gxti]

I found the Dell in a bin, it works and is perfectly suited to the role.

How much power does it draw at idle?  I bet a little Atom-based board would pay for itself in short order compared to that rust bucket, and still wouldn't flinch at saturating a 100mbit connection. I'm totally jealous of the fiber, though.

[Monkeh]

I found the Dell in a bin, it works and is perfectly suited to the role.

How much power does it draw at idle?  I bet a little Atom-based board would pay for itself in short order compared to that rust bucket, and still wouldn't flinch at saturating a 100mbit connection. I'm totally jealous of the fiber, though.

Something like that? At a guess, 80-90W. Mine will be similar, with about eight times the processing power (it's a Core 2). It's not running pfSense, though, and does rather more than routing.

[Kibi]

I'd like to measure the power consumption with one of those plug thingies. pfSense now includes a beta of Asterisk. Asterisk is what I use for the home PBX system. If I can get Asterisk to work on the router box, then I can shut my Asterisk box down thus saving more power overall.

[StubbornGreek]

Nice setup, Kibi. I am a HUGE pfSense advocate. I've tried a ton of router os', UTM's, you name it and I enjoy pfSense the most. The amount of features and power it offers is, lol I'm starting to sound like a commercial; you obviously know what I mean.

I did get hooked playing with Astaro for a while but the 10 user (device? don't remember) limit for the non-commercial version was a killing blow to its potential. Untangle has become the Ubuntu of router os' but the really cool features are paid for...I'm ranting again.

If you must (or your needs don't demand a better box) use a Linksys, Netgear, etc, consider dd-wrt as an alternative to the stock firmware - it gives your gear a nice little breath of life.