Building my workshop

This year I builded my final workshop (I hope so ;-). It’s a 100 square meter wooden building covered with solar panels. Builded next to the sawmill, it contains all my woodworking machines and tools. I now have a good place to work effectively.

The foundations were made with the help of a friend of mine and the use of a Mecalac. Yes, this was the opportunity to swap my forklift for a Mecalac, an incredible machine.

I sawed all the wood and crafted the timber structure alone. The incredible machine allowed me to lift it also by myself.

I designed and installed the complete solar system on the building. If everything goes well, it will cover all the costs of the construction after about 15 years of electricity production.

Wooden cabin prototype

This summer during my holidays in Ardèche I started a cabin project with my friend Fred. We designed and built a 9 square meter wooden isolated cabin. It’s intended to receive people even during winter.

Fred has a mobile saw mill and he debited all the Douglas pine wood for the project. We then started to build the structure and the outside cladding. Later we made the windows and the door in my workshop. The assembly on the client’s site took place last December under falling snow…

Next step will be to think about a more industrial way to build this cabins.

Here is a timelapse of the assembly on site.

Summer project: solid oak kitchen

This kitchen was planned since a long time, but I managed to free some time this last weeks to make it real. It’s designed to fit in my small parisian kitchen but also to be suitable for any futur kitchen. Made out of solid oak wood, I tried to build it with the most precision I could get with my tools.

The wood came rough sawn and I had to plane it on this small planner/jointer my father gave me. This tool came from an old combination wood working machine and I had to adapt a motor on in to use it independently.

To cut the tenons, I added a new mode on my Arduino controlled Jig that allow me to give in the tenon width and the offset of the first cut and then to cut them all with the same settings.

Arduino Controlled Table Saw Box Joint Jig

Some weeks ago I equipped my workshop with a very good table saw (from the Austrian manufacturer Felder) and since I discovered this great website and in particular this jig, I just had to build my own. Due to my experience with stepper motors, I decided to use one of them grabbed from a scanner in combination with an easyDriver and an Arduino (an old mini I had left). I tried to keep the design as simple as possible without making use of some special hardware but the precision of the whole thing is quite good: about 0.03 mm.

I put the Arduino code here and the schematics for the board I built is here.