The new prep lab chez jpc

[jpc]

Inspired by Ptychodus04's cool new building in the back yard, here is mine I built soon after Mrs jpc and I bought a new house.

 

One of my requirements for a new house was lab and fossil storage space.  I claimed the whole garage.  The dealwe made is that since there is no room for her car in there, I have to scrape ice and snow off of her car on those mornings for her.  And I get the garage. Thanks Hun.

 

Here,Pickles plays ferocious guardian of the garage.  I have since gotten rid of the Suburban (left side of photo).  Its earlyyears were spent with the AMNH in NYC as their specialized fossil machine. It now lives on a local ranch.

 

  

 

Let's have a looksee inside... as bought: 

The walls look like they are falling outward, but that is a trick of the camera.  Alas, not totally, the walls are indeed leaning out, so the first step was to shore up the walls to each other.  A bit before this all started, Office Max in town went out of business.  I bought 25 linear feet of their shelving.  That's it leaning on the wall behind the colorful ladder.  

 

Below are the ceiling joists almost completed.  Is 'joists' the right word?  The ladder came with the house.  Score!  I did all thiswork around a lot of my stuff lying around.  

 

First and second steps.  First install OSB on walls.  They will later be sprayed with insulation.  The walls don't go all the way to the floor;  rest on the cement risers which approximate the level of the ground around the garage.  Then install a floor. That's my partner in crime, Jason checking for level.  

 

Install the fourth wall. 

 

Install internal window as an afterthought, and make a door.  My compressor now sits outside the lab, in the corner behind the open door, seen here behind the Office Max shelving on the right side.  The door was positioned to fit the compressor behind it. 

 

More OSB walls.  Might as well put some on the ceiling as well.  I am not a professional, I just make it work.  Notice a bit of moisture on the cement wall to the right of the table saw (also bought with the house... Score!)  That has been remediated by putting gutters on the outside of the garage.   

 

Install flooring,heating and a pegboard.

 

And now we skip ahead to after the room is done and shelves are moved into the front half of the garage. Office max shelves off to the left.  

 

Somewhere I have a photo of the lab before I sullied it up by actually using it.  Somewhere.

[Dinoguy89]

Beautiful workspace, looks like a huge amount of room. Also nice doggo

[rebu]

Great space, looks huge. I am sure you are going to have lots of fun in there. Well done.

[jpc]

When all was said and done, and all the shelves filled with fossils and camping gear and etc., there was still a few plaster jackets that did not fit into the garage.

 

 

So it was time to get the ole chop saw and drill/screwdriver back to work.

 

Building...

 

...a storage shed:

 

 

Therein lay my retirement projects. 

 

 

 

 

 

[jpc]

And now for a few shots in the lab as it looks this evening.  This first shot shows where I do most of my work.

 

same corner, zooming back:

 

and the screen-washing station tucked into the corner there under the Barbourofelis poster from the U of Nebraska.

 

And because we all love pix of fossils, here is what I am working on now.  I should have been working on it this evening, but here I sit. This is a canine tooth from a large Eocene mammal, a Coryphodon, from southwestern Wyoming collected back in about 2000.  I need to look that up.  I'll show pix of it when I am done.  

And this is a pile of croc scutes, also Eocene from the same part of the state.  I started working on this one last year, but then got bogged down in contract work.  (Which is not a bad thing).  Hope to get back to it soon.  I haven't counted the scutes, but there are also three articulated verts and a leg bone, which are pretty cracked up.  The CD on there is from the CT scans we did of it at the local hospital.  I was hoping we would see more actual bones, but no.  The pile of scutes in front of the CD was found by CT scan,though.  

and here is a close-up of some of the scutes... (I love croc scutes). 

 

Thanks for looking, y'all.

 

 

 

[smt126]

That is quite a deep garage. What are you using for a air filtration system since I see the duct work going up the walls into what looks like a bin? Are you able to prep without a respirator with that setup like at the museums? Also I think i used to have that same flooring in the kitchen at my old house, some roll laminate from menards. 

 

I still am shocked they will do free cts for you....but also happy for you that they do.

[Walt]

Great space to work in!  Part shop, part man cave. Well worth having to scrape ice off the windshield

[The Amateur Paleontologist]

All those unopened jackets are making me 

 

But seriously, that looks like a wonderful workspace!

 

-Christian

[Tidgy's Dad]

What an absolutely splendid "Show and Tell."

Loved it and that's quite a wonderful result, a great prep and storage facility.

Makes mine look like a broom cupboard. 

[Ptychodus04]

Wow! @jpc that puts my little shop in its place! Well done. I’m more talking about scoring the garage from the missus than the build.  That’s a debate I lost 17 years ago.

 

Now, on to the shop... Very nice. I also wonder what you’re using for your dust control. Do you use spot collection combined with general dust collection?

 

 Yes, joist is the right word but scute isn’t (just giving you snarge, glad to see you use that TFF classic). 

 

Also, very nice collection of jackets. 

 

Thanks for sharing your process.

[RJB]

Very Nice JPC.   I dont know what your last prep place was like, but it looks like your already running out of room?  Does anyone have a big enough garage?  

 

RB

[KimTexan]

Awesome workshop. 

Does your screen rinsing station actually have running water or is it just a tub with water? 

What is on the ceiling above the ventilation exhaust pan? I assume that’s what it is, a water pan to catch particulates. Curious how it works, but curious what’s on the ceiling too.

Oh, love the croc material.

[caterpillar]

Beau travail JP. Tu vas pouvoir bosser à fond!!

[JohnBrewer]

wow!

[Uncle Siphuncle]

Most industrious of you, sir.

[Wrangellian]

What a lot of work! But well worth it, apparently. Nothing like a new start, and a bigger space.

Up here we would call those rafters, I think.

Thanks for the tour!

[Ptychodus04]

7 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

What a lot of work! But well worth it, apparently. Nothing like a new start, and a bigger space.

Up here we would call those rafters, I think.

Thanks for the tour!

(Pedantic troglodyte enters from stage right)

Properly speaking, rafters support angled structures like roofs. Joists support horizontal structures like floors and ceilings. My first job after high school was building houses and I got to learn more than one would usually want about construction but that helped my shop build to go really fast. 

 

I’m sending my pedantic side to the corner now.

[Ludwigia]

@jpc Very cool! Am I correct in assuming that this is your private cave for your own amusement and private commission work? And that the stuff you do for the museum is done in their shop?

[jpc]

Thanjks you guys.  Here are my answers toyou question.  

 

ptych... I use a woodshop double bag dust collector like this, with 5 micron bags attached, not the standard issue.  

It is connected to the PVC pipes you see running along the top of the wall in the first two photos.  The thing is not too quiet so the next step is to build a closet around it for noise reduction.  Meanwhile, the music gets turned three notches higher.  Yes, they are osteoderms, but I learned scutes back in 1983 when I first got int this stuff.  I will use scutes til the day I die.  

 

RB... yeah, running out of room.  

 

Kim... that is the heater up on the ceiling.  I know you folks in Dallas have no idea what this does, but when it gets cold up here (in certain months, rain falls as this frozen stuff called snow), we need to have heating in buildings.  : )  But seriously, are you asking about the big gray boxy thing?  That is the heater.  No running water on the wash station.  I didn't want to pay to do any plumbing.  I did think of having a gravity feed tank up high, but I unthunk it as well.  

 

ludwigia- yes, this is my private area.  The museum area is much bigger and almost as fancy.... and maybe less messy.  

 

 

[Ptychodus04]

4 hours ago, jpc said:

Thanjks you guys.  Here are my answers toyou question.  

 

ptych... I use a woodshop double bag dust collector like this, with 5 micron bags attached, not the standard issue.  

It is connected to the PVC pipes you see running along the top of the wall in the first two photos.  The thing is not too quiet so the next step is to build a closet around it for noise reduction.  Meanwhile, the music gets turned three notches higher.  Yes, they are osteoderms, but I learned scutes back in 1983 when I first got int this stuff.  I will use scutes til the day I die.

 I had to give you a hard time about it.

 

We see pictures of snow, then I go out to my shop and turn on the air conditioner in the winter. I actually had to do that a couple weeks ago. It was 92 degrees in my shop and then the temp dropped almost 60 degrees overnight.

[CBchiefski]

Thanks for sharing such a great set up, makes me wish I was preping instead of writing grants.

[Wrangellian]

10 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

(Pedantic troglodyte enters from stage right)

Properly speaking, rafters support angled structures like roofs. Joists support horizontal structures like floors and ceilings. My first job after high school was building houses and I got to learn more than one would usually want about construction but that helped my shop build to go really fast. 

 

I’m sending my pedantic side to the corner now.

Yeah, these being added after the fact, I wondered about that.

[Ptychodus04]

1 hour ago, Wrangellian said:

Yeah, these being added after the fact, I wondered about that.

Yep, still joists even though they serve a dual purpose of keeping the ends of the rafters from pushing the tops of the walls out as was happening originally. Eventually, if @jpc hadn’t been so industrious, the weight of the roof would have collapsed the entire garage.

[Wrangellian]

The word I was missing is truss, for the triangular frame of the combined rafters/joists and connecting pieces (whatever they are called)... I used to know this stuff but it's been a long time     It looked to me like JP completed the trusses.

[Ptychodus04]

8 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

The word I was missing is truss, for the triangular frame of the combined rafters/joists and connecting pieces (whatever they are called)... I used to know this stuff but it's been a long time     It looked to me like JP completed the trusses.

Ahh, that makes sense. Do you ever feel like you've forgotten more than you've learned???