Some years back we had a nice little weekend place out in the wilds of the California Sierras, in a little place called Coulterville. One real plus to the place was a nice shop building that had been built originally as half shop, half cabin when the main house was being built. I opened it out to be all shop space and settled in to build stuff. At 16ft by 32ft it was a reasonable size and the roof peak skylights made it very light and pleasant to work in. Well, for most of the year. In mid-summer it was an oven, even with both sets of double doors open and in mid-winter it was a freezer - Coulterville is fairly high up and gets quite noticable winters, unlike the Bay Area.


Here we have the view of the machine end of the shop, showing the dust collector tucked in the corner - before I had plumbed everything in - and my Inca bandsaw. In front of that is the Robland X-31 combination machine I had back then.

This is the other end of the shop, the bench and storage area.

In the middle - for a while - was my ShopTask Gold combination mill/lathe. It was a quite decent lathe but an infuriating milling machine because of the non-repeatability of the positioning of the mill head (they claim to have solved this in later models). After a couple of years I sold it and found a friend with a decent CNC mill; much simpler.