The Tale of Econocrane: The Summer Fling of 2022; Or, More Twin-Turbo System Testing!

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I received the message during the middle of Sunday at Momocon.

Come and get it. 700

– this dude

Still donning my trademark cat ear headphones, I ran through the crowd towards one of the many exits of the Georgia World Congress Center in a attempt to get some reception for the U-Haul trailer reservation.

It was too late in the day by then to get out and do the retrieval, so we struck a time for Monday. The next morning, I hitched up Vantruck at the local U-Haulmongers. At this point, these guys basically know me by name, and I pretty much just walk up and grab whatever I need. This is how you know things have gotten really bad.

So what the hell was I getting? Behold, this absolute something:

That’s… yeah, you know what. I don’t know either. Because I always have a heartbeat on the regional terrible diesel Ford van market, I tend to see listings pop up not long after they’re posted. And trust me, due to the prevalence of the van chassis in commercial applications, there are a lot of oddities.

This thing actually showed up for me back in August of 2021, and I went to inspect it at that time. It was located across town in the “acres of metal recycling yards, tire shops, and half burnt-down apartments” neighborhood, of which Atlanta actually has a couple but that’s besides the point. At that point the seller wanted $2500, which was quite optimistic for a non running chopped up ambulance chassis without a title. I figured I’d let it bake for a while before lowballing him, and then promptly forgot about it due to the impending Battlebots season and the fact that, you know, I already had three of these damn things.

That was, until that fateful Sunday. Basically, he was going to junk it the following week so it was me or the yard from whence it came. That’s right – I learned from him that he bought it from a junkyard which had built it as a side project. It certainly fit the bill, with a 12 foot flatbed and that makeshift towing empennage for dragging scraps around.

You know what? A little over the dollar amount it would have scrapped for is a great value for (YET ANOTHER) potential engine donor for Vantruck. If I build up a big enough pile of vans, surely one of them will be useful, right?

It was clearly an ambulance chassis with the box removed, and it still had the ambulance light and siren control console (but with all of the wiring scrapped out of it). The odometer showed around 58,000 miles, which seemed reasonable to me – ambulances usually don’t go very far, just idle and hang around a lot.

With immense difficulty, the seller and four of his buddies helped me winch the thing onto the tow dolly. Everyone made sure to take their guns out of their pockets and put them on the sidewalk beforehand, because safety first! We promptly discovered the front axle was too wide for the tow dolly – the lug nuts were digging into the plastic fenders, and there was no flex room available (These tow dollies rotate slightly at the axle centerline to aid in turning).

After some “SURGERY”, the right fender of the tow dolly and right side step of the… thing were removed, as right turns would necessarily be tighter and require more articulation. I bought a round of beverages for all involved for the three hours of finoodling this took.

And an hour later, I’ve bestowed yet another eyesore upon the neighborhood. A pox upon my house in particular, said my neighbors, presumably. As night fell, I prepared the tools and substances needed to perform a routine Unknown IDI Diesel Reboot. I’m not sure if I should be proud that this is now an SOP for me.

So in the end, this thing needed…. absolutely nothing.

Yup. Two freshly charged batteries and cleaned up cables and terminal clamps and off we went. I didn’t even get to use the Spicy Canned Air.

The general vibe with these old engines is that they need 1.21 jiggawatts to build the compression and to run the glow plug system, so any decay in the electrical system will quickly affect their ability to start. And for most people, batteries and electrical systems are basically black magic, which is why so many of these listings say “Needs fuel pump idk” when the real issue is they can’t turn over fast enough to light off.

I pulled it gently off the dolly and slowly backed up the driveway – that front tire had fallen off the bead, so it couldn’t be inflated. I had to replace at least 3 tires due to dry rot anyhow, so no biggie.

Not wanting to extend my U-Haul rental another day, I had to now put the fender back on before returning it. Mikuvan acted as the yard shunt to get the dolly closer to the garage. These fenders have 4 bolts holding them on, but the light is not on a connector – we had to cut the cable off, so I had to reattach it.

I quickly spliced the cord back together with some solder-shrink splices. Notice that these wires have already been spliced once? Makes you wonder if someone has been in here before with the same idea.

Maybe I should mark that down as pre-existing damage on my rental contract…

Nobody will ever know the truth.

The following weekend, I made a trip to my favorite local Hispanic-owned used tire peddler, where the tires are stacked high and haphazardly. These nice folks also know me well at this point since I keep showing up with terrible van after terrible van. I had to replace three of the tires (the passenger front and both rears) because I was concerned about how much they were flaking apart in my hands.

This was a good chance to actually see the difference between a real Ford dual rear wheel axle setup and Vantruck’s fake dually conversion. That’s right, for the longest time, Centurion didn’t use a true DRW axle because Ford didn’t make the > 8500 pound GVWR cutaway van chassis yet. Vantruck has dually spacers, front and back!

This makes its front track very slightly narrower than the factory dually setup here. But it seems like that makes all the difference when it comes to fitting on the U-Haul tow dolly.

On the rear axle, the drum brakes are wider, there are more leaf springs, and the aftermarket ambulance upfit also added airbags. This is a 11,000 pound gross weight chassis based on the door sticker. Vantruck, in comparison, has a 9,900 pound label (probably for regulatory reasons) and the heaviest GVWR stock non-cutaway van of the time was 8,500 pound.

The most notable feature of this abomination is the homemade tow rig sticking out the back. It’s a vernacular attempt at a hook-and-sling wrecker, as far as I could tell. The body is entirely made of 1/4″ thick diamond-plate steel welded (WELDED) to the frame with 1/2″ thick plates and 1/4″ thick angle irons. WELDED. This whole thing was rigid!

The Towing Empennage was held in with bolts and backed up by these chain binders which appeared to brace it further up the bed. I’m guessing it’s removable for hauling or picking up scrap metal, and attached whenever it has to go recover a WE PAY $$$$ FOR JUNK CARS subject.

Just like an old-school tow truck, it was run by a winch and cable instead of hydraulics. This is just a 12,000 pound off-road winch, bolted to the body. It still worked if hooked up – I winched up the tow bar so it wasn’t at Stab Everyone In The Face height by gently tapping a battery with alligator clips to it.

Overall, I respected the builder. As I said, it was clearly a vernacular attempt at making a utility vehicle for a job at hand. There was nothing that I found outright wrong or incorrectly made. Really! Someone had a appreciable learned-on-the-fly understanding of structures and the strength of materials. The welding was messy, but all solid looking.

It’s not how I would have done it if you told me “Make a tow truck that’s also a flatbed that’s also a shitty cut up ambulance”. But it’s how someone did it, and the sheer effort put into crafting a singular and unique tool like this is something I can bro-nod at.

Via my terrible vehicle chat groups, this object was christened Econocrane, for being made from a Ford Econoline chassis and having a crane sticking out the back.

As I said up top, while the mechanical and fabrication skills needed to bang something like this together is more common, the electrical complement is not. This is the level of spaghetti wiring that was prevalent throughout the cabin and towards the rear here. I had to chase these dragons upstream a little to find the original van tail light and body lighting harness.

That’s because it didn’t really have any taillights to speak of. I ordered these “Generic Truck Combination Light” units and bolted them to the side of the bed so I could at least drive it places.

In this photo: A tow truck that is doing useful work, and a tow truck that is ???????!!!!!!

As expected, Econocrane was slow. The immensely heavy all-steel bed and empennage made it feel somehow slower than Snekvan when I got it running, almost Murdervan-tier with its older 3 speed transmission. Driving it was very binary – it was pretty much either full beans or nothing, also a common sentiment among vintage diesel owners. I never took it over a truck scale, but I was betting this was north of 7500 pounds given all the 1/2″ and 1/4″ steel plates making up the back half.

Speaking of, the transmission also seemed to be on the way out, as it needed a few seconds to think and build up pressure or something if it ever was taken out of Drive. It also had a habit of holding first gear forever then smashing into second or third. Definitely a rebuild core if I ended up sacrificing this thing.

I took Econocrane around town and to the lab a few times because… hey, why not scare your coworkers some more!? I also took it back to the junkyard I THOUGHT might have been responsible for it. They denied all knowledge of it ever existing.

Sus. To be fair, there are probably a half dozen scrap yards around here and the seller couldn’t remember where he got it from, only pointed thattaway.

At one point, I followed the cab wiring around to see if I could get the sirens to turn on again. Unfortunately these sirens ended up being just big loudspeakers, not the self-contained kind. So they needed the controller, which had been ripped out long ago.

If a Ford van chassis is impossible to service, then an ambulance integration piled on top of it is basically needing quantum entanglement to change a fuel filter. These ambulance builds usually add a lot more wiring, switches, lights, etc. and this one in particular had several runs of underhood heavy-gauge power wiring added, including a master shutoff and a current shunt (seen top center above the grille).

Heavy wiring also extended out the former cab back, presumably to an inverter to supply house power to the “ambulance” bit. A big electrical distribution box was placed under the driver’s seat which fanned these wires out from the engine bay feeder. Coolant and A/C hoses also were greater in number than a typical van since the box would have needed climate control. On top of all that, there were controls for the air suspension.

I continue to maintain Ford never intended for anyone to “service” these things so much as run up the 50-80K miles in a fleet before problems start appearing and then sell it down the river. To me. All of them.

It’s turbo time!

Econocrane was funny to have as an object for a few weeks, but beyond being visually interesting, it was just another 1991 IDI chassis much like Snekvan was. By July, Snekvan had long been knocked down and taken by the methy scrap man, with all of the turbo parts stashed. I began wondering if it was worth putting a second prototype together.

This would allow me to start clean and basically see if I could put my own “turbo kit” together and what issues I’d encounter with an from-scratch install. Snekvan had been built very incrementally and there wasn’t really a data package or installation notes besides whatever I scribbled in my notebook. Because I wasn’t sure if I could even manage the swap project, the plan for Vantruck all along as been to perform the swap first, then install my setup, instead of doing it all at once.

Econocrane therefore became an opportunity to refine the design and process. So I challenged myself: Could I do the full install in a weekend?

Let’s begin. First, I removed the PCV valve (or CDR, or the ham can…) in preparation to turn it around. The PCV has to be attached to a source of atmospheric air or mild suction instead of boost pressure, so it can’t point directly into the intake manifold any more.

I used an expanding pipe plug to block off the vent hole. Snekvan simply used a rubber grommet silicone glued in place.

The CDR turnaround bracket was reused in full from Snekvan, including the heavy hydraulic hose stumps used to convert the flush output hole into something I can put a breather hose in.

Snekvan just had the glow plug controller hanging randomly wherever, but I went ahead and formalized the measurements and made a bracket out of aluminum that will let the glow plug controller bolt in slightly lower. This was one of the points of improvements I sought to make, as one of the problems for people turbocharging the IDI is always repositioning this glow plug controller.

A lot of creative solutions involving valve covers and extension brackets exist, but I was hoping I could escape the worst of the engine bay cramming with my approach. This bracket makes it so that no wire cutting/extending has to happen.

I just twisted the harness around to face the other way, and bolted it in.

The turbos and downpipes were already made for Snekvan, so installing these two was quick and painless. The same main oil gallery spigot on the driver’s side rear corner of the engine block was used for the turbo oil feed.

I routed remaining segments of the “slinky hose” from the turbo outputs up to the engine bay. On the right, it follows the transmission dipstick. On the left, the auxiliary (rear) heater hoses act as a guide. Vantruck does not have these hoses so I’ll have to figure out another way to constrain it.

Notice the left hose is black and the right is orange. The left one is made of neoprene, which is not oil resistant. I just had it standing around and decided to use it instead of buying more silicone hose. This would prove to be a mistake as it melted after a while, so later on it was replaced with more orange silicone hose.

In one morning/lunch period, the turbos were installed and hoses run. Not bad so far!

Up at the front of the engine, I made another turbo oil return assembly by drilling a panel-mount barb fitting into the timing gear inspection cover.

I decided to go for broke right away and cranked up the fueling on the injection pump all the way. I think it was around 1.5 turns of the Magic Hog Cranking Screw before I felt it stop fully.

Here is the finished “upstairs” integration with the Onyx intake adapter curing. The wastegate actuator hoses are also installed.

With the afternoon progressing, I went on a quest to collect basically every 2.5 inch exhaust pipe in a couple mile radius. I had to mate the turbo outputs to the funny dual stacks and I wasn’t going to do it very professionally.

I recovered the exhaust system I banged together for Snekvan, including the “Trumpet of Shame”, to reuse the output flanges and most other parts.

I’ll be honest, putting this exhaust adapter setup together took longer than installing the everything else. There were several awkward turns to make because of where the stacks are positioned. Also, I never really took a photo of them… but the 5″ diameter exhaust stacks are welded to a 5-to-4 inch adapter, which is welded to a 4-to-3 inch adapter, which is welded to a 3-to-2.5 inch adapter before making the turn.

This was simply more impetus to keep Vantruck’s eventual exhaust system to 3 inch tractor stacks or Corvette side pipes or something.

And here we are, both sides finished on a Sunday mid afternoon.

The last step of it all before bootup was wiring in the oil bilge pump into the ignition circuit. I used the same Key-on/Run circuit as Snekvan, though for Vantruck I want to figure out how to use the Accessory circuit or a timer relay so it doesn’t keep cycling the glow plugs.

Overall, I felt pretty validated that the “turbo install” will go smoothly. I specifically wanted to avoid invasive surgery as one of the requirements of the project, and I think this was accomplished. I only really had to drill 1 hole for the oil return fitting, and everything else cutting-shaping-grinding related was just fitting that exhaust up. I’m not aiming to ever sell these things as kits because my target market would be like 7 people (But we care… very much…) but hey, it’s contributing to the knowledge and shitpost base!

Alright! It’s time to go test drOH MY GOODNESS this thing is far quicker than it should ever be. It was a relatively low mile engine with great compression (it never failed to light off with what felt like less than one crank rotation). The Magic Hog Cranking Screw was bottomed out, and the wastegates were left from Snekvan at about 15 PSI (I never put the boost gauge back in to verify). I was easily contesting the interstate at-will, and the straight-piped exhaust stacks shooting out bald eagles and airstrikes whenever I went to pull out to pass simply added the corn-syrup-candied cherry to the whole experience.

This was truly an OBNOXIOUS, MENACING machine.

I tried dailying it a few times and just couldn’t stand the exhaust noise. This was good to confirm, because Vantruck definitely needs mufflers now. The deafening booming got old real fast. On top of that, my opinion is that a straight-piped IDI engine actually sounds like garbage. I’m not sure what property of the firing order or manifold design causes it, but they sound like they have a skip or missing cylinder.

One thing I noticed was that the weenie little “clicker’ fuel pump it came with just couldn’t keep up with the fuel demand any more. I’d have plenty of fueling for the first few seconds… then it felt like it runs out of steam. Friends told me to get a high-volume fuel pump and pressure regulator, and so I grabbed a gently used Holley vane pump off the orbiting cruft cloud of eBay, along with a matching regulator.

The regulator is quite important because fuel inlet pressure strongly affects the timing inside the distributor pump, and too high an inlet pressure basically causes it to lock timing too far advanced and the engine runs like trash. I dialed the regulator in for 6 PSI. You’re technically supposed to re-time the engine (by shifting the distributor pump) if the inlet pressure ever changes, but meh.

Here was another good lesson learned for Vantruck: I hate this fuel pump. Being made for racing applications, it’s very loud and draws a ton of power. I think for Vantruck I’ll stick to a larger capacity Facet pump, such as the one I put on Spool Bus, maybe two in parallel

You know exactly what’s happening next.

By mid-August, with the system having built up a lot more trust from me driving it to work and randomly to meetups and events and all… There was only one place left to go.

Yep, a three hour jaunt up to my favorite proving grounds. No van of mine is fully commissioned without this last important sea trial.

Besides it being thunderously loud the entire way there and back, I didn’t have a single problem. This is quite encouraging for the Vantruck build.

Econocrane was another squirrel-brained adventure that turned out to be a very net positive (??????) experience. I managed to make some incremental design changes to the turbo system, and found out that it installed from scratch very painlessly. I then ended up with a machine that was the very embodiment of American excess: Loud and obnoxious, menacing and antisocial, fuel-guzzling and emissions-spewing, built by one or more people with their hands and only one brain cell between them all. A rented brain cell.

Then I proceeded to do fuck-all with it all fall and winter. Econocrane served its purpose, so I just kept it stashed in the yard. And so, when the city came a-knocking, I decided it had to be culled.

Luckily, the Econocrane story has a happy ending. I was lucky to find a “wholesale buyer” in none other than the wonderful, fantastic Speedycop. The builder of many hilarious LeMons race vehicles, you probably have heard of his work if you’re knowledgeable of Car-tube and the world of shitbox racing.

Jeff and friends tripped down from his new Tennessee fortress and took Econocrane off my hands along with the two Citicar cheese wedges, which I’ve been sitting on since spring ’21 without a single post about. He has plenty of plans for these things, so stay tuned to his channel and page! Econocrane in particular will be a drivetrain donor for a terrifying new build he wants to do, which I’ll happily race with Vantruck because hopefully we’ll finish up around the same time.

The funny thing is, the Speedycop Walled City is located mere minutes from the Tail of the Dragon. With how many times a year I tend to end up there, it was almost like having a custody sharing agreement. I occasionally dropped by to say hello to the children:

On the next episode of Big Chuck’s Backlogged Vans: A quick return to robots as I took Sadbot to a heavyweight sportsman’s style tournament in Houston. Yeah, 2022 was an absurdly intense year! i”LL fInAlLy LeArN To rELaX AnD ChIlL OuT

The Evolution of the Robot Trap Shop, 2020-ish to Today

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I thought I’d take a quick detour from the ever more delayed 2022 van and robot content, and dive into where all of these activities were taking place. A lot of this stemmed from simply looking through my old photos to see in what arrangement I had things before the move. I realized then that my whole facility evolved through necessity and new acquisitions… mostly getting larger and larger… and so I felt it was another interesting ‘build log’ of sorts that people could find useful or entertaining.

Up until the Old Robot Trap House, I hadn’t really had a place to call “my” workspace or facility. Sure, I had the run of the place when it came to my years at MITERS, and subsequently at the lab then known as the International Design Center where I was the steward of the fabrication space. But it was always someone else’s space too, or I was doing it for someone else.

At “Marconi Motors“, it wandered even more towards a personal space between me and the bros, which was great until our consulting gigs and then the startup company had to take over all the resources. By 2019, when the company grew enough to move to a real building, my workspace consisted of one bench in the back of the loading dock area where all of our other “Co-founders’ Baggage” was kept. That was where the first Überclocker V5, or 30Haul, was spawned. At the same time, this was when I was renting a garage bay for the Vantruck rehab that summer, which luckily concluded as they found a real business tenant in lieu of my “Barely keeping the lights on” at-will tenancy.

What I didn’t like about that arrangement was the existence of a 3rd location I had to physically go to. Rents in the Boston area were already sky high (and they’re absurd now), and so I felt like I was getting a bad deal as I had to rent a garage to work on stuff as I had to rent an apartment for a not insignificant amount of money, an apartment that at times felt like I was only falling asleep in for a few hours a day. I honestly feel pretty lucky that the garage was around the corner from said apartment; if it were further away in the outer reaches of town, I probably wouldn’t have gone there nearly as often, and the Vantruck project would have drawn out much longer.

This ever-present feeling of living for the sake of someone else, at the mercy of someone else, was a major factor in leaving Boston in the first place. But it was also a chance to consolidate my operations. Instead of renting an apartment again ($1200-1500 for a worthwhile one at the time of early 2020) and then finding another shop space or makerspace (probably several hundred a month minimum with no guarantee I could even find one amenable to van activities), I would just accept that my Boston cost of living would be a baseline and I would see what I could find to house the entire operation.

Again, I was quite lucky to find the Old Robot Trap House because it wasn’t listed on any of the apartment finder websites, just on Craigslist, and I was also lucky enough to see it on Craigslist not long after it popped up, and happened to be making a trip down already for job interviews. The other options I had queued up were, let’s put it this way.. “real” houses in “real” neighborhoods, and I have a sneaking feeling almost none of the adventures of the past 3 years would have happened in such “real” communities. I, of course, use “real” with the largest airquotes you can buy on McMaster-Carr.

So let’s get to it. This is what the 2.5ish-car detached garage of the Old Robot Trap House looked like in the days after I dumped the U-Haul out. It was just boxes, totes, and stuff on carts. I went ahead and broke down all the shelves I came to own (through my MIT, Artisan’s Asylum, and company building moves) and brought them with me.

By mid January, the shelves had been reassembled and stuff was falling into place. The shop wasn’t really functional yet, as the tools didn’t have homes and I’d just plug stuff in as I needed.

Inside the house, I reserved what normal people would call the ‘living room’ as my 3D printing room, electronics lab, and Equals Zero merchandise warehouse. The goal was to avoid ‘dirty’ work inside and to keep it to the garage.

One of the January immediate activities as soon as I made space was either obtaining or making workbenches and tables. I ultimately decided to just pound some out instead of waiting for an industrial auction or Facebook Marketplace miracle. The thought of paying several hundred dollars each to Global Industrial or ULine was abhorrent to me, of course, for something that I’ll probably just beat senseless and drill holes into.

These benches were 8 feet by 30 inches, since I could arrange three of them across the back of the garage. Or at least that was the plan, until I figured I didn’t need that much bench space right away, and decided to make only two.

I also made a 4 by 8 foot rolling table for general integration and assembly work. The first target project for this facility was, of course, Overhaul 3 for BattleBots’ later-delayed 2020 season. At this point in January, I had most of it designed already and needed a landing spot for the parts I wanted to order.

Taken some time in February 2020, this is the first iteration of the Robot Trap Shop. Looking pretty nice, right? By this point, I’d managed to accrue a lot more tools on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Besides the tinylathe, I got the Craftsman floor bandsaw in the back for a song and dance. It needed some love, but wasn’t anything I considered difficult (but to the normie, it might as well be a writeoff). The arbor press off to the left also came from Craigslist.

Enjoy this photo, because this was literally the last time the place looked this good!

The living room now contained this very cozy EE corner and 3D printing row. Behind me was the Equals Zero stock shelves, as well as some more shelves and racks for electronic parts and projects. The small workbench to the right came with the house (it was sitting in the basement when I moved in), and is a very interesting little stainless steel framed table with a neglected/abused butcher-block top which I sanded a little and oiled. Hey, a table’s a table.

It’s some time in early 2021 now, and the garage is starting to get….. tragic. I’ve accrued another tool chest, which became dedicated to the lathe and mill as a tooling cabinet. I grabbed Overhaul 1 back from the company shop as well, and there was even an Overhaul 3 and all of its parts to contend with (foreground). The air compressor that I half-bought, half-built in the back half of 2020 is also visible here.

Notice, too, that the shelves have all been shuffled to one side. This was done to arrange the bandsaws in a more useful fashion and put up a stock rack of sorts on the back wall. Yes, bandsaws – months earlier, I accrued a 8″ horizontal bandsaw as well, which has featured many times here.

I set up a bunch of shelves in the unfinished half-basement and transferred as many of the van parts as I could down there instead, along with electronics cruft that was on the garage shelves. The basement had climate control but wasn’t particularly insulated, which was fine for storing stuff that I’d prefer not get humidity cycled like the outbuilding.

The next addition came in Late ’21 into early ’22. I had found a local discount store (the kind that sells Amazon, eBay, etc. returned goods or damaged stuff in big bins) which miraculously had some serious hardware come through, including this laser cutter. It had a big dent in one corner and the tube was broken on the inside, so it was scrap to everyone but me. I made a too-low-to-advertise offer with a snide comment that I’d likely be the only person to buy it, so you might as well.

A replacement tube and dialing in the mirrors later and I had a K40-type 18×18 60 watt laser cutter. Oh boy!

This thing needed its own facility since it needed cooling water and an air compressor. I built another rolling bench in the usual fashion (same height and wheels as the big 4 x 8 foot one) but equipped it with a 1 inch thick MDF top for smoothness and a lower shelf deck. All of this effort… and I ran it from a bucket of water. Oh well…

The 3D printer cohort changed towards the end of 2022. I gave away the old trustworthy and working Fakerbot to a former student/mentee who wanted to start doing stuff on their own. The orange Up Plus printer which is now 12 years old became my private office 3D printer because the lab printers were always backed up.

I became a Creality Household when, in January of 2022, at the same junk store I found a returned Ender 3 V2 printer that was missing the Z axis towers and some other parts. Same story: Who else you gonna sell this to bud? Simply buy 400mm Z axis lift kit on Amazon and suddenly, new small portable workhorse printer.

Some time later, a co-worker was getting rid of an Ender 5 Plus. Its huge print volume (350mm cube) appealed to me greatly, despite the more primitive hardware in that product line. In the most inopportune of coincidences, the coworker’s friend actually had contacts at Micro Center who told me that there was an open-box Ender 5 Plus at my local store. TWO Ender 5 Plussen in the SAME WEEKEND? More likely than you think. In fact, as I took this photo, one of them was printing something.

I was 3D printer’d out, but also out of tables to put them on. So I decided to fully refactor the “Living” “Room” with 3D printers on this wall!

These Ikea Linnmon tables are nice and portable, but what I found was when you put tools and equipment on them, they sag over time. All of my original 2020 3D printer tables had acquired a roughly 1/4″ sag in the middle, with the Markforged Mark Twos being heaviest and causing the most sag.

To remedy this, I turned them upside down, sanded them gently down the center of the underside ( to get rid of the waxy coating they come with as a byproduct of manufacturing), and glued a 2×4 down the middle. Because the tables had sagged, I propped them up and put a bunch of weight on each one to make sure the wood glue sets with them straightened out.

I picked up a few new Ikea Linnmon tables and pre-emptively did this same operation to them for the updated EE row:

A lot more space for activities! Notice, too, that I added a magical 5th leg to these extra long Linnmon tables. These were the extra long 59 or 65 inch model and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to put on these in real life without them bending. The parts and project storage was consolidated to where the Equals Zero stock racks were, as by this time I’d basically stopped selling anything.

This was the final state of the “Living” “Room” and garage right up until the day I started packing things up.

That leads to the present (ish) day.

Taking the lessons learned from the past three years of ops, I decided I wanted the following out of the New Robot Trap Shop.

  • Having all of my tools out in the garage but my EE/wiring inside meant I often walked in and out of the house just to get something. Besides being real cold in the winter, it meant more dirt and grunge was tracked inside the house than needed. With a full size basement now, I wanted to consolidate most light fabrication work and electronics work indoors.
  • Keeping van bits with vans, now made possible by the hangar. Avoiding bringing greasy van paraphernalia inside the house and polluting all the Generic Cheap-ass Renovation White walls!
  • Consolidate my cruft and project storage into one spot instead of three (side of garage, basement, “Living” “Room”

Here’s how that’s shaping up!

This room is adjacent to the hangar and will become what I call the “Minishop”. The toy machine tools will live here, along with my benchtop drill press, cordless tools, and other light fab stuff. For doing small mechanical work, this would be pretty much it. Eventually I’ll be building up the “heavy” shop in the hangar bay, probably with a full size mill and lathe. All of the welding and obnoxious grinding/sanding will also be out there, though I’ll keep my small belt sander inside here. There’s a cubby off to the right which I’ll set up as the nut and bolt repository.

This was allegedly a basement bedroom, according to the old faded labels on the circuit breaker panel. Like many of these older construction homes, it’s basically an entire second house downstairs with a (former) kitchen and two bathrooms with a central living room.

The Minishop a few days after the first photo and from the opposite direction. The bench against the machiner-ing accessories toolbox was a new construction, and I built it extra heavy because it’ll eventually support a “midi-mill” like a 7×27 size Grizzly or Precision-Matthews.

What I found was that the bench I put tinylathe and the BenchMaster, Master of Benches upon began sagging over a year or so because of its lightweight build. This is why the long bench above had sprouted an extra middle leg. I also paved over their tops with 1/8″ hardboard since the exposed OSB had deteriorated (and I had drilled, cut, sanded, hammered, screwed, and ground into them anyway). Coincidentally, these tops were cut from the very hardboard I bought to act as moving sidewalks.

These familiar looking shelves are being populated into “Basement Bedroom 2”, which is I suppose the basement master suite because there is a bathroom off to the left here. It’s very long and rectangular, which is odd for a master bedroom in my experience, but it lets me line up a bunch of shelves together. I plan to order two more 4 x 2 foot wheel shelves like these, and that should be more than enough cruft storage volume. There’s also a walk-in closet off to the right which I’ll fit with built-in shelves some time for even more cruft storage volume. What, are you supposed to put your family in a house like this or something?

In the main “Living” “Room” I’m back to my old antics. This 450-ish square foot room is going to be the EE/3d printing/cosplay/whatever headquarters. To this end, I went ahead and built some more tables (my life for the past two months has contained a lot of woodmongering), once again because I couldn’t find what I liked on the secondhand informal market.

Except these are much much more serious. They’re 8 foot by 3 foot deep and have 1.5″ thick laminate tops. They’re too large to ever fit through the basement door in any orientation. Each leg has a leverller on the bottom and I actually leveled them together. Like the old pit ponies of First Industrial Revolution coal mining; they were born, will serve, and will die underground.

I simply do not believe in soldering on a table you can wiggle by hand.

The EE bench row temporarily dressed out. In this state, it’s functional, but I’d like to move my tools out of the plastic cubbies into a real dedicated tool chest. I also will eventually put shelf rails on this wall, since some of the equipment could live on a second deck instead of occupying table space (plus, more space for cruft). The reason I made these a full 36″ deep was so I could lay out bench tools like the power supplies, meters, and scopes and still have space to fondle boards.

Some time in the near future, when I feel like doing more woodworking, I’ll make one more 8 x 3 foot table to span the two columns present in this room since they are otherwise just in the way. I figure integrating them into a bench will make it seem like it was always meant to be that way!

Behind the vantage point in the previous photo is the 3D printing wall, basically transposed from the Old Robot Trap House. This gallery of misfits was actually more of a pain to set up than it might seem and in fact led directly to the rest of the space being laid out the way it is.

So whoever did this basement patch-up job went ahead and wired the entire back wall of the living room and “Basement Bedroom 2” on a single circuit. Not only that, it’s regular 14 gauge Romex cable but being fed by a 20 amp breaker. That’s neither up to code nor is it even a good idea (like, if you must throw the NEC out the window, at least do a funny or out of the ordinary thing, right?). Therefore, my original plans of putting the EE Lab in “Basement Bedroom 2” and the 3D printers along where my big EE benches are now…. were foiled. I can’t have that many bed heaters and soldering irons and hot plates sharing a single circuit.

This led to a brief game of chase-the-circuit and find-the-breaker. I decided that this wall was the only plausible spot for 3D printers. It was served already by the basement kitchen GCFI loop (three outlets, one circuit). But right next to it was another circuit going towards the second basement bathroom. Well, I don’t have plans of making the bathroom a heated build chamber or theater or something, so its power needs are very light (literally… just lights). I forked that circuit to the 3D printer row, so now it’s served by two 15 amp circuits. The computer and Enders are one, and the Markforged machines (plus future undetermined printers, maybe finally my own resin printer) will occupy the other.

So that’s where I stand as of 2 or 3 weeks ago. Like the Old Robot Trap Shop, the New Robot Trap Shop is probably going to be a work in progress for quite a while to come! As of this point in time, I can hammer out a beetle if I need to (which I will, for Motorama!). The hangar is still a disaster area of half-unpacked totes and dangerously teetering shelves full of van kibbles. I risk tripping and impaling myself on one of several Overhauls every time I walk in. My life is full of very unique Charles-related problems.