Focusing on Projects

One great feature of our new home (besides the lake just down the hill) is the ‘extra’ garage downstairs that makes an excellent shop space! We have been adding tools and tables as we go to support various projects, but with the arrival of the mill in August it finally became more of a shop than a garage.

Shop Upgrades

We finally upgraded from an old overflowing lunchbox-style toolbox to a real rolling tool chest. This works really well with a pair of tables on casters in the middle of the garage. Behind it is Andrew’s old computer at a desk-height table that is great for programming and electronics work.

The 3D printers are on a table near the heater, which will be very handy this winter. We still have the old workbench we refurbished in California by the door, which is definitely the most stable surface in the shop!

The south wall of the garage is where the 240V power is located so we opted to put the mill over there. Somehow we are already out of storage space on the rack, so we will probably get a second and make a little island of shelves.

The final plan for the garage might involve a bandsaw and a mobile cart of the woodworking tools. There is also space left for the CNC router that Andrew is trying to build and an area near the sink for a fancier brewing setup.

Mill Unboxing

The mill weighs over 500 pounds so it took some careful planning to get it off the pallet and on to its stand. We were just able to make things work by maxing out the reach and capacity of our harbor freight engine crane! It isn’t in its final position so we haven’t connected it to the floor yet.

New Job

Andrew left SpaceX in June, with his last day occurring exactly on his 9 year anniversary with the company. With so many projects to do on the house or in the garage there just wasn’t enough time left to give a SpaceX job the attention it needs. However, with so many friends from SpaceX and CMU off doing amazing things it wasn’t long until he got wrapped up in someone’s crazy startup!

In August, Andrew started a consulting business and now works part time as a contractor. Right now he is working with some SpaceX friends in the solar industry doing engineering work remotely. It is a much better work/life balance than the remote job with SpaceX! Hopefully he will also get a chance to use the shop for some prototyping as well.

There have definitely been some challenges in making this transition (Finding the right E&O insurance has been a nightmare!). It is a very different experience to manage tracking your hours, sending invoices, filling out legal forms, and tracking your spending compared to the SpaceX free-for-all ‘engineers just go do your thing’ way of working. But, for the most part, work is still just designing machines with awesome smart people, so its loads of fun!

Hop Harvest

Somehow we are blowing through our dual keg setup of homebrew faster than ever. It could be because of all of the visitors (or it could be from the temptation of an afternoon beer when you work from home!) but we drained the Emarillo IPA in two months and have almost finished the Chestnut Point Porter in the same amount of time.

To replace the Emarillo IPA we whipped up a simple Belgian Pale Ale. This beer has been very refreshing with all of the heat of August! August also brought the first hop harvest of the season. Emily managed to harvest over 3 ounces (dried) of our Chinook hops!

After drying them out, we stored them in the freezer until we were ready to brew with them. There were still plenty of flowers on the vine, but unfortunately when Emily went to harvest them a few weeks later they had become infested with aphids.

Luckily, the hops we already had in the freezer were plenty for a black IPA. We combined two different black IPA recipes (Stults’s famous “once you go” and an all-chinook recipe we found online) with a kitchen-sink of random bittering hops we had leftover from other brews to create our home-grown chinook black IPA.

One thought on “Focusing on Projects

  • What a dream! You’ll be a fully self-sufficient homestead in no time.

    Don’t be too bothered about the declared limits on that engine picker haha. Don’t ask. And since you have all the tools now, I guess it’s time to start working on cars! They’re an investment.

Leave a Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *