My 2026 Shed Tour!

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:20]Hello, mini me. Now, behave yourself because today we've got visitors. Hello everyone and welcome to the channel. My name is James Rumble and today I'll be showing you the workshop. So when we first moved to this property at the bottom of the garden there was two sheds and a greenhouse. Greenhouse went almost immediately. I sold the shed in the middle and I kept the corner shed to keep my tools in while we were re renovating the house. I then laid a concrete base almost the full width of the garden and built the first part of the workshop and that measured about 19 ft by 11. And I built it over the old shed. I needed the old shed to keep tools and equipment safe and dry in whilst I was building the shed. And then once the shed was built, I dismantled the garden shed and disposed of it. And that shed kept me going for a number of years. And basically where I'm standing here was the end wall. Some years later, I built a smaller shed at this end. That shed was when I was doing radio control cars, and that's where all the radio control car stuff sat. And this section here where we're standing was open. Fast forward a few more years and I took the sidewall of that shed out. I took the sidewall of that shed out and I joined the two together making this slightly odd shaped shed. So in terms of size, this measures around about 328 square ft or 30.4 square m. So, I think that's about roughly about the size of a double car garage, although the footprint is quite different. It's fully insulated.

[00:02:12]I've got lots of lighting everywhere.

[00:02:15]And I've got some greenhouse heaters that provide a constant heat supply just to keep everything dry and rust free, and I don't get any moisture problems in here whatsoever. I fitted a couple of Velux roof windows that gives me plenty of light, and in the summertime, it just keeps the place a bit cooler. Although with a fully insulated and breathable roof, it stays pretty cool out here in the summertime. Anyway, so that's the shed. That's the boring bit. Move on to the more interesting bits, the tools and the equipment. So that end of the shed is mainly storage. So a lot of my carpentry tools are stored down there.

[00:02:52]I've got a an area where I hang locomotive parts while I'm spraying them. Mainly storage. The first machine we come to is a harding lathe. And this is an absolutely wonderful machine. It really is. It's a It's a collet lathe.

[00:03:09]So you can see I've got an array of collets up there ranging in size from a 32nd all the way up to an inch and an eighth. And then similar in the imperial sizes. I've also got rectangular collets. I've got square collets. I've got hexagonal collets. It's a very accurate machine. It's very, very quick to change the collets. It has a tapered nose and so I do if needs be have chucks.

[00:03:39]So I got fourjaw, threejaw chucks that will go on face plates.

[00:03:45]Very very versatile machine. So this machine is my most used machine by far.

[00:03:55]very accurate and and actually quite an easy machine quite an easy machine to be accurate with. So that is the Harding Harding HLV. So the next machine is a Medings pillar drill. Very nice machine.

[00:04:09]It has a low and high range gearbox. To change from a very high speed to a low speed, you just flick that lever over.

[00:04:19]So I don't bother with any belt changes.

[00:04:22]I keep the belt in the middle pulley.

[00:04:24]I've got the variable frequency drive.

[00:04:26]So the variable frequency drive in conjunction with the high and low speed gearbox really means I never actually do any belt changing. Although on this machine it's very very easy. There's just a cam lock there that loosens the belt and you can do your belt change.

[00:04:46]Swing it back.

[00:04:48]Drop the lid and you're ready to go.

[00:04:50]Very nice machine. Very accurate. very powerful. So, next machine is a little one ton arbor press. So, this machine I generally use for pressing bearings in brooing and uh it's a small machine. It takes up little bench space but it is very useful. Then we have our offhand grinder. We got a little 12in walkco folding machine. Quite a handy little machine. I don't often use it actually because I've got a bigger one further into the workshop that we'll see in a minute. But um it's it's quite useful.

[00:05:27]As you can see, I don't have enough space to have all these machines set up individually. So, if I want to use that, I have to move the grinder out of the way and then drag that forward. Even behind the folder, there is yet another grinding machine, which is a wet grinder for sharpening my carpentry chisels.

[00:05:43]There's a little roller there that I built from a plan in Model Engineer.

[00:05:48]I've never actually used it, but it looked like it would be quite useful at some point. So, the next item is this nice little fella here. This is a George Thomas design. The castings were available from Hemingway and it is for tapping. It holds your tap square to the workpiece which helps prevent break in taps. That was built from a kit and I've mounted it on a old surface plate. Next, we come to my cutff saw. So this is the second FEM saw I've had. The first one was a bit smaller and uh whilst perfectly adequate, I just wanted something a bit bigger. So this is a fairly recent acquisition. I have this on this pull out table because again not having a lot of room in here. I need things to be easily moved around. So this is really to do with my carpentry work. I will run through this very quickly. It's a festal miter saw. I won't say any more about that because it's wood and we're talking about metal.

[00:06:47]This is a gabro folder. It is ideal for model engineering and prototyping where you're making a whole range of different sizes, different shapes. You're putting different folds in different materials and you want something that's really really versatile and this really is versatile. Whilst you wouldn't be able to bend anything particularly thick in it, I mean, you'd probably only want to go up to about 16 gauge, maybe 14 gauge if it was narrow. I took it off its stand that it came with and mounted it up on this tool cabinet. Uh, you'll notice that I've got a lot of these tool cabinets around the workshop. About 10 years ago, I came across on eBay all these cabinets, all these pole store cabinets, which are basically the same as listister cabinets or beta cabinets.

[00:07:40]Before I had these, I had some very basic workbenches with plastic boxes underneath to all my bits and pieces. And the plastic boxes all stack one on top of the other. So, if you wanted to find something, you had to pull everything out and it was inevitably in the bottom box. and it was a real pain. Next machine we come to the band saw start right band saw. It's a 10-speed band saw. You have five speeds on the pulley and then there is a reduction gear box which is operated by a knob that you just pull out uh and it engages the reduction gearbox. So this is nice because for cutting metal you do need a low speed. So that 10-speed gearbox gives you that low speed. But what I can also do for the woodwork and I need a higher speed is I can just reach behind, pull the knob out and it will switch to high speed. Now tucked right away in the corner here is a set of Edwards rolls. Now believe it or not, I can actually use those in that position for very small rolling jobs. Uh the next thing again is made by Gabro.

[00:08:53]I'm not sure exactly sure what you'd call it. It's a sort of a shear. It's sort of a notcher. It's sort of a guillotine. Unlike your conventional sort of shear, which is doing this, and it's bending a piece of material out the way, and you get a lot of defamation, you've got this very accurately brown ground blade that sits between the guards, guides. When you cut, you've actually cut it in that sort of fashion. So what it means is you don't get any defamation of the plate. I then got a lineer up here which I use for deburring and polishing materials. You got a few bits and pieces up here.

[00:09:31]That's a 5C collet indexing head.

[00:09:35]There's a rotary table there. It's a nice Hoffman 8 in rotary table. There's a Jones and Shipman sign vice. So most everything you see in the workshop, the tools and the equipment are items I've mainly picked up on eBay. I spent quite a long time waiting for tools to come up. I didn't immediately jump on a tool that I wanted that came up if it was too expensive, it was too far away, and if it if it didn't look like in particularly nice condition. So most of the bits and pieces you see in here haven't cost me that much money because I have waited for the right item to come up and some of them I have stripped down, cleaned and repainted. So now we come to the mill which next to the lathe is the most often used machine in the workshop and this particular machine is a Theel 158. It dates from the 1950s.

[00:10:33]It's a West German machine and it has a vertical spindle and a horizontal spindle. All three axes have power feeds to them, but not any rapid power feeds, which would be a nice thing. So, it's a lovely, lovely machine. It was built in that period where things were properly built.

[00:10:55]And judging by the sound of that, somebody wants to say hello. Let's just see who's come to say hello.

[00:11:05]Come on. Come on. Come on, Polly.

[00:11:12]And it looks like the workshop dogs have come to say hello.

[00:11:18]Have you come to say hello? Daisy Juke.

[00:11:23]Now, Daisy, we're doing a very important film. We're showing everybody the workshop, and they don't want to see you.

[00:11:35]Where were we? So, as the machine dates from the 50s, and I think I've made a mistake there. I think the machine dates from the 60s. The electrics in it were a little bit Dr. Frankenstein. So, I removed all the electrics aside from the feed and speed motors and connected it to the console that I made up, which contains two variable frequency drives.

[00:11:59]On this side, we have the spindles. We have forward, reverse, stop, and we also can adjust the speed on the variable frequency drive. We also have gear boxes, two gear boxes, one for the feed, one for the speeds, but this just allows you to fine-tune it either side. And then also, we got a similar thing for the feeds. And then behind me on the shelf here, you'll just see all sorts of paint and screws and nails and chisels, spray paints. I've got various in the corner here. I've got most of the stuff you see down here is stuff really that I bought cuz it seemed like a good idea, but it's not really received a lot of use. So, the next machine we come to is a Mifford 254. So Mifffords will be a very familiar name with all model engineers out there. This is the 254. I think it was the 1980s and Mifford decided that they they really should maybe come up with a slightly more modern machine and try and pitch it towards light industrial use. So they came up with the 254, which is this machine you see here. So it's slightly bigger than the ML7 in as much as the ML7 will only take a 7 in diameter piece of material whereas this will take a 10 in. The biggest advantage of this machine is the B the spindle bore it will take a 1 in bar through it whereas the smaller the ML7 only takes I think it's about a 5/8 in. I made this backsplash back stand for it which has got all the various tools on it. So, now we come to my second drill, which is a flot, which is a German drill. It's a high-speed drill. To be honest, I bought it before I had the medings drill because I originally had a Celely bench drill, and it wasn't particularly accurate. So, I bought this, which is high speed, very accurate. In all honesty, the medings drill is more than accurate enough what I do and it will run at as high a speed as ever I need.

[00:14:06]So, this oddlooking contraption is called a miracle bender and it is for bending flat strip steel. It's going to be a bit tricky to show you here cuz we haven't got any room, but basically what happens here is you've got this block on an eccentric. So, depending on the thickness of your material depends on how you position the block. You can clamp the material. Well, I mean, I'm only folding a very, very thin bit of aluminium. The machine is designed for sort of bending quarter plate, but what is really, really nice about it is you are looking down on your bend, so you can get your bend exactly right. The disadvantage of it is it's a very heavy machine and it really needs its own permanent bolted down spot somewhere, which I haven't got. So, the next machine we come to is a Clarkson cutter grinder. And this machine I use for sharpening the ends of an endmill for just tickling the ends. I picked it up very very cheaply. It had a work light attached to it and I sold the work light on eBay and got a silly amount of money for the work light because it was industrial chic and somebody was going to put it in their sitting room. Again, it was in a bit of a state, so I stripped it, cleaned it, painted it.

[00:15:20]There's there's arguments as to whether it's worth actually having one of these machines because the price of endmills is so little nowadays and and and there is there is a lot to be said for that. I however have found that I've been halfway through a job and I've been using I don't know let's say I've got some quite big endmills and I might have been using like a 3/4 endmill halfway through a job and I thought that's that's not cutting properly to knock the edge off that the ability to just come to the machine to tickle it up and to carry on with the job rather than say we'll order another endmill and have to wait three four days for that to turn up makes the machine worth having up here tucked up out the way is a TIG welder. A lot of the items I'm constructing are fabricated out of a number of different bits and pieces. We showed you in the first video items such as the front bogey, the rear pony truck, and they're fabricated out of lots and lots and lots of little bits of steel plate. The TIG welder is ideal for just tacking those little bits together. And then when I come to silver solder, they're held really firmly and I can just flood the area with silver solder. Welding terms, I've also got a MIG welder here, which is a much bigger plant. And that one I tend to use for things like the the the workbenches I built in the workshop.

[00:16:47]They're all MIG welded together. The trolley frames that I use for pushing around the seven and a quarter engines, they're all MIG welded together. I don't use it very much on locomotive parts on the parts for the models because the welds tend to be a little bit big. And then of course I've got for silver soldering. If it's small components I'll use just the small torch or if it's anything bigger I've got a bigger bottle of propane hidden away under there and a nice big SVER torch for the bigger parts. So that's the main items of machinery in here. So some of the smaller stuff.

[00:17:29]We'll just go through the jaws. Got various milling cutters, parallels, various tools.

[00:17:38]This is all taps and dyes, dice stocks, tap wrenches, some ER40 holders, er collets, various machine cutters.

[00:17:52]This is that high-speed drilling head I was talking about earlier that I don't use anymore. We got a fourjaw for the mifford. Some change wheels, face plate, traveling steadies.

[00:18:03]There's all the replaceable tips for the indexable tooling. There's various boring bars in here.

[00:18:11]reamers, woodworking tools, tool makers clamps, engineers clamps, tin snips, silver solder, and that's just bits and pieces, all sorts in there.

[00:18:28]Various pliers, spanners, imperial, metric.

[00:18:35]Uh there's a lot of measuring equipment in here, micrometers, depth gauges.

[00:18:41]similar in here.

[00:18:44]Screwdrivers, punches, Allen keys.

[00:18:50]I'll mix mix mixture in here. Now, here you are. Here's a funny story for you.

[00:18:56]That's John Lacy's He was a racing driver. Drove for the team I worked for. His right foot was obviously used on the on the on the throttle and uh the throttle pedals are abrasive and he was finding it quite uncomfortable from continually sliding off the throttle pedal onto the brake. So we made up this insert for his racing boot and it was the right hand boot. So that's Jea Lacy's There's sockets, electrical testers, there's a rivet closer.

[00:19:34]These are quite boring, these drawers.

[00:19:36]Well, if you weren't bored enough for those previous ones.

[00:19:39]This is mainly to do with my daytime job.

[00:19:47]Few electrical bits. What we got over here? Oh, hand files, axles, axle blades.

[00:19:56]hammers, tapes, electrical leads. Uh, that's all really to do with the day job as is that one.

[00:20:07]This is air tools, soldering irons.

[00:20:10]There's some different torches for the TIG welder.

[00:20:14]There's some abrasive belts for the sanders and and and general fixtures and fittings of the other machinery.

[00:20:22]There's electrical belt sanders, grinders, drills, jigsaws, and then electrical cable in that one. And moving over here, this is grinding. This is fixtures and fittings for the Clarkson tool grinder. There's various wheels.

[00:20:38]And there is some bits and pieces for the wet stone grinder that's hidden away behind there.

[00:20:47]Various vices. Little set of rolls. Pipe bender.

[00:20:54]Oh, day job. Day job.

[00:20:58]Nuts, bolts, washers, springs, O-rings.

[00:21:05]Yeah. Miscellaneous.

[00:21:08]Mainly angle plates, VB blocks, nuts, bolts. This one over here is materials.

[00:21:16]So, first drawer is brasses, copper, and stainless steel.

[00:21:22]Then we got steel round.

[00:21:26]This is the larger steel rounds. And also the phosphor bronze. This is flat section, square section. And then this is the ugly drawer with just all sorts of different stuff.

[00:21:40]So, this one here is where I keep the locomotive parts. Top one, I've just got paint data sheets and transfers.

[00:21:50]And we just got various there's they're just various bits and pieces. I mean, some of them are for the seven and a quarter engine and some of left over from the 5 in.

[00:22:02]There's the coupling for the 5 in 9F that that's actually the the tender coupling. So, normally the carriages would be connected to that, but obviously we we don't use these for passenger hauling as they're not considered safe enough. So, um I've got an ugly bar on the back of the tender for passenger hauling. Bits and pieces.

[00:22:23]There's an example of car cylinders that we talked about in the first video. Um you know, I said about how difficult they were to hold for machining. As you can see, there's no nothing square on it. So, if you try holding it in the machine vice, it just it won't hold square.

[00:22:41]And then there's my pile of drawings.

[00:22:43]There's various tooling I've had to make up for the seven and a quarter. So, for when I'm building engines, tenders, whatever else it may be, I use this hydraulic scissor table. Now, I opted for a a double scissor. So, you've got the two scissors here, and then on top of it, you've got another pair of scissors. And what that means is you can actually get this table at a really nice usable height. Whereas a single scissor table, you can only ever lift them half this height. So you can get this to a really nice eye level to work on. Because my workshop is multi-function, I have to use it as a carpentry shop as well. If I need additional space, what I can do is lower the table.

[00:23:38]I've removed the handle, as you'll see why in a minute. So, up here I've got this additional worktop and I've got this series of pulleys and I've connected it to a winch and I can lower this worktop. What I do is I've got this pendant over here.

[00:24:07]Uncip these.

[00:24:10]And then I winch all that lot back up into the ceiling to keep it out of the way. And then I got a really nice workbench. Not only have I got a long workbench, but I can get all the way around it. And that is really, really useful. I've got it covered in these sheets of sacrificial 12 mil MDF. If I'm painting or cutting or likely to cause any damage to them, I just put these sacrificial sheets over the top, which as you can see, there's been a fair bit of painting going on on these. So, I'd rather it be on these than the worktops.

[00:24:46]Well, there's an overview of the workshop. If you're hoping for a more detailed look at some of the machines, we'll be doing future videos where we'll concentrate on the major machines, particularly the lathe and the mill. But if you've seen any other machines in this video that you want more information on or a deeper dive into, please let us know in the comments and we will cover that. We look forward to seeing you in the next one. Bye-bye.