The First Post

 This is my big boys blog of shed and workshop related activities. It is a look into the inner sanctum of a mans shed. I recently moved a bunch of things in my life and also moved house and shed and its taken a while to sort things out enough to get back to any sort of a creative vibe! As some background I've always built stuff. In fact I've build quite a lot of stuff. I wont go into the details because this is a looking forward type of gig and not a retrospective. This blog is about getting set up in a new space, learning new things and moving on.

As a taste of what's on the agenda, I have two imminent projects; Building a new shed and teaching myself to tig weld. The reasons for the shed are obvious.... more creative space. Tig welding may be less obvious. I have always ridden motorbikes and tinkered and built bikes from a young age. When you build or modify anything on a bike sooner of later you come across welding. Now I can gas and mig weld and that's fine but the one thing I never cracked was welding aluminum. When I was a kid AC tig welders were expensive and mostly 3 phase. You needed a really really good reason to own one, mostly because it was your job and not just for playing around with bikes. Now thanks to those hard working Chinese an AC tig welder is just about justifiable as a toy / hobby tool. Why aluminum? Well I grew up in the days when the café racer was king, first time around that is (full disclosure, I'm 52). I spend my formative years thumbing through the greasy pages of bike magazines and the alloy tank was my "holy grail" of bike building! More recently I've been spent a few hours on YouTube watching the likes of Jesse James fashioning alloy tanks and fenders, so that's it. I'm going to teach myself to weld and build myself and alloy tank for my bike. With that in mind I've been on a short training course and the Machine shop in Hinckley (more on that later). I got a recommendation for the sort of welder to buy and ordered one.

I have gone for an R-Tech AC / DC 170 and here is a picture of my new pride and joy.

Well that's it for my first post. The next post will be unpacking and setting up this bad boy!