Found a Great New Guy to do my Wiring

The workshop is really coming together. Unfortunately, I am the main force making that happen. They say that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I keep telling myself that isn’t true and that I should go ahead and pay people to do things, but it seems like they never do things as well as I would have, regardless of their credentials.

I paid an electrician about half a Lamborghini to increase the current to my workshop from 50 to 100 amps. You would think I would have had a perfect installation ready for whatever upgrades the future would bring. Not so. Today I had to install a frame size breaker in the workshop main panel, and the electrician didn’t leave enough slack in the feed wires, so I had to lengthen them.

Leaving excess wire is a fundamental thing for electricians, like not grabbing a wire to see if it’s still hot. It’s very basic. You never know what kind of work a customer will want in the future, and if you don’t leave extra wire behind, you may cause him a lot of problems.

I don’t want to run the electrician down. Most of what he did was great, and he was wonderful to deal with. It’s just that there were little things I would have done better.

I paid for #2 copper wire all the way across the yard. Not cheap. I could have gotten aluminum, but sometimes it has problems, so I paid a lot more than I had to. I also made sure they used a large conduit in case the #2 wires had to be upgraded in the future. I did all that and still had to splice the wires to make the frame size breaker work.

The main panel has 4 spaces for 250V breakers, plus a big space at the top for a frame size breaker. This is a breaker that feeds an entire panel, like a main switch. It’s not for receptacles and so on; it just feeds the panel.

My workshop panel has to have a way of shutting the power off with one switch, for safety reasons. You can do that in more than one way. You can run the power for the shop to a breaker on the panel, and you can also get a frame size breaker. My electrician opted to save a hundred bucks by running the juice to an ordinary 100-amp breaker which took up 25% of the panel’s spaces. He used just enough wire to reach that breaker, plus about 6″. To use a frame size breaker, I needed another 6″.

The company saved the cost of 6″ of wire, which would be about two dollars, and as a result, I had to drive to Lowe’s, spend like twelve bucks, and waste maybe three hours of my time.

I tried yanking the wires to see if there was any slack available, but there wasn’t, and I was in danger of damaging the insulation, so I stopped. I got on the web and found the answer: split bolts.

A split bolt is a hex bolt made from copper. It has a big cavity running down the middle, so it’s forked. You put two wire ends in the cavity and tighten the nut. It smooshes the wires together firmly. Then you put about a pound of various types of electrical tape on it, and you have a code-approved splice.

You can also grease the wire ends. This will supposedly prevent electrolysis which can mess up the connection. Some dude on the web says you can get electrolysis even when everything is made from the same metal.

I got two huge split bolts and two feet of #2 wire. I greased the wire ends with Super Lube grease, which apparently does everything. The text on the tube lists an endless number of uses, including use as dielectric grease.

I put two extensions on the hot wires, cranked the nuts down, and buried the assemblies in two kinds of tape. The connections should last forever. I crammed them back in the panel box, put it back together, and fired everything up. It works. Now I’m sitting pretty. I have a 50-amp plug and two 20-amp plugs coming from the main panel right now. The subpanel will have a 60-amp connection for my phase converter, plus a whole bunch of 250V receptacles.

The frame size breaker is installed, and the work I did looks really good. That’s because I actually thought about it. I didn’t get permits, and I am not getting inspected, because Florida law exempts this type of building from these requirements, but in the end, I’ll have a setup which exceeds code and looks and works better than whatever an electrician would have installed.

I’m using #3 90°C copper wire to connect the 100-amp breaker that feeds the subpanel. It’s rated for 110 amps, which it will never see. I could have used aluminum, but I wanted to do a good job. It’s all going to be in steel conduit, sized correctly. I got myself a new conduit bender so the conduit will be bent around anything that’s already on the walls. You don’t really have to do that; you can lay conduit over, say, a garage door control wire and just let it rest on it, but it’s more workmanlike to put a couple of little bends in your conduit so it goes over the old wire like an overpass.

I have another frame size breaker coming, and it will go in the subpanel. It’s overkill, really. I’m installing a subpanel with room for 6 full-size 250V breakers, and I could have given up one of them to connect the subpanel to the main panel, but I want to be ready for the future. The subpanel will actually be bigger than the main panel, now that I think about it, and it’s close to the center of a wall, so wire runs from the subpanel won’t be nearly as long as they would have been had I chosen to run things from the main panel.

All the hard stuff is done. Running wire from the house to the workshop was a big job for two men. What I’m doing now is comparatively easy, and since I spliced the feed wires, there are now no electrician-caused problems in the shop. Once you get to the main panel, everything is ship-shape.

I have all my woodworking tools in one area now, where the old Corian counter used to be. I painted the inside of my woodworking tool cabinet white so I can see what’s in it instead of staring into blackness, and I fastened the cabinet to the wall by the table saw so it can’t go wandering off. Everything is on wheels, so I can move things over by the roll-up door when I use them. I can open the door and blow the sawdust out.

I made an improvement in my lathe cart. It was a steal at $30, but the casters were unbelievably bad. They have brakes, and the brakes are always on no matter what you do. I worked on them a little and made them work better, but one of the casters is missing a ball bearing and will never be right. They’re made from cheap materials, and the tolerances are crazy, so there was never much hope for them.

I could probably have gotten Home Depot to do something for me, but even if they replaced the caster, I would have 4 awful casters. I decided to get a set of China casters from Amazon. I got the same ones I used on my tall cabinet. The cabinets are made by Husky, and they take the same casters, so all I have to do is screw them in. When I went to look for them online, Amazon had a returned set on sale, so I jumped on it. All told, the cart will now have something like $52 invested in it, plus tax. Not bad, given that the regular price is $70, with bad casters.

I finished up my spray boom mount. I was not able to get the materials I really wanted. I had hoped to have two square tubes, with the one holding the boom telescoping into the other one. I could have attached the boom with a pin, and the mount would have taken up less room when stored. I could not get two tubes in appropriate sizes. I decided to put a flange on the lower mount, with two screw holes in it. When I use the mount, I’ll run two screws through the flange and the boom. It will work fine.

I’m not happy with the paint I chose. I used Rust-Oleum hammer finish paint, which looks great. The problem with it is that it stays soft forever. When I work on the mount, the paint gets marred up. Next time, I’ll use farm implement paint. The part itself is very nice, though.

I need new projects now. I have a shop, so I have to do things. I want to start making wooden bird toys. Store toys cost $18 each, which is insane, and the birds can’t tell the difference. I want to build a battery-charger shelf. I really need that. I’m looking around for things to improve.

I should have the new outlets up by Thursday. After that, there will be no reason to put off moving my big machines up here. Can’t wait for that. Once I have machine tools, welders, a belt grinder, a finger brake, and woodworking tools, I should be hard to stop.