This article was first put up on Guddler's Domain nearly a year ago and really should get completed sometime soon! Shortly after it got to the stage you see at on this page the guy who had lent his trailer to store all the content of the garage needed it back in a hurry so it was all hands on deck to complete the project in less than 5 days (we were in the middle of a very cold winter here at the time!). Consequently taking pictures and documenting it were completely forgotten in favour of getting the cabs back into the warm...
Normal garage door - adequate for storing your car, USELESS if you want to house cabs and pins!
New
sectional door. MUCH better... As we can see the door opens up into
it's own space allowing you to place pins and vids RIGHT up to the
door. This particular model is also fully sealed around all edges
and has 40mm of thermal insulation inside it. At over a grand
though, it doesn't come cheap!
Day 1: Clear garage.
Day
2: Floor goes in. Note the
need to keep shuffling the machines around, hence the damp-proof
membrane gets put in in two halves and joined together. There was
simply no other way to do it!
Day 3: Batons start to go in for the walls, and the
right hand wall is largely complete. This proves to be very hard
and lengthy work...
Day 4: Not much to photograph on this day. The 6mm
cable that takes the 32A supply from the consumer unit goes in (not
visible), batoning continues on the left hand wall and the 25mm
polystyrene insulation starts to go in. The picture was actually
taken after day five, so the cable you see hanging down is part of
the normal 13A ring that will have a standard double switched
socket at the end of it...
Day 5: Cabling. It's not finished yet, but here's a
few pics. There is a 32A feed (6mm cable) coming down near the
garage door. This will go to a 45A double pole 1 gang switch. The
ring will come out of and return to this switch. Then there will be
a normal switched two gang socket in every corner of the garage. In
addition to this, there will be four unswitched sockets on each
side of the room (8 in total) that all the vids will be plugged
into. These will all be switched by two four gang "grid switches",
again near the door. The power to the room is adequate to have
everything running at once. The 2 gang switched socket which runs
from the normal house ring is left untouched so that all the
machines can be killed using the main switch, but i can still leave
some equipment such as a low power heater switched on overnight if
i wish.
Day X (many weeks
later!): Okay, well, as with
all things nothing went desperately according to plan in terms of
timescales! The weeks went by, xmas came and went, but at long last
after much effort, the end is now in sight. We now have a few pics
of the current state (10/01/04). We've literally just finished
putting the ceiling up, all the walls have been up for a
while.
Tomorrow i'll go off and buy some coving to cover all the gaps
around the edges (seemed far easier than filling all the gaps with
plasterboard! - if it get's too hard, cheat!!). Then it's skirting
boards, filling, painting, cleaning up and getting everything back
in (oh, and some loft insulation along the way). It's been a pain,
but i reckon i've saved myself somewhere to the tune of £1000 by
doing it myself (with a little help from Mr Bazfish
obviously).
Gratuitous Monaco GP
shot - and yes, i do have the
proper montior and bezel, i'm just lacking the chassis so that 10"
Hantarex is just resting there for the time being so it can be
played while i await the arrival of the proper Sega chassis, when
i'll be able to pop the proper monitor back in and get it all
sorted - Anyone got one of the proper dinky steering
wheels?
Umm,
inside of garage with ceiling and opening where the loft hatch is
going to be.
And from
another angle...
More pics
to come of the final thing as and when it happens
(SOON!)
Copyright © by Guddler's Domain All Right Reserved.
Published on: 30-11-2003
