From a Truck Trailer to a Mobile Workshop
From a Truck Trailer to a Mobile Workshop
From a Truck Trailer to a Mobile Workshop
Make it anywhere with a mobile lab
By Steven K. RobertsThere are lots of reasons why a fully portable lab might be worth considering: a lack of workspace in your house, maintaining continuity through a move, hauling your toolset to a client site, conjuring a nomadic hackerspace community that can coalesce around projects, “bugging out” without losing effectiveness, creating a private shop without construction legalities… or just because it’s efficient, cool, and away from distractions.
After over a year of getting too little done, I realized that the solution should have been obvious up front: build a mobile lab, rent out the real estate, and move all operations to wheel estate. Thus began the Polaris project, a tight and efficient electronics lab and workshop built into a 24-foot utility trailer — a distillation of my sprawling 3000-square-foot building (originally the Microship lab). Ancient dusty inventory parked on shelves was abandoned en masse, and countless tooling redundancies were eliminated as I applied years of experience to building a workspace focused on current activities instead of the “might need it someday” mentality that had spawned a shop overflowing with dormant tonnage.
Almost immediately I found that I prefer working in the new mobile lab, and it has quickly become much more than just a miniature of the old one. It contains a ham radio station with deployable antennas, robust security and networking tools, a marine-grade stereo with embedded iPod and Sirius satellite, excellent lighting, a dedicated Mac, and all the parts for upcoming boat projects. Resources include a cabinet of hand and small power tools, drill press, folding table saw, sander/grinder, compressor with a few air tools, bench vise, wire-feed MIG and gas welders, industrial sewing machine, and (very soon) a CNC router. The main lab bench offers a 4-channel Tektronix scope, Metcal soldering station, stereo microscope, power supplies, a stock of Arduino goodies, and the usual suite of small test instruments. And the inventory, at last count, fills 869 drawers — including a wall of small-parts cabinets that are secured by a folding 8-foot whiteboard when underway.
Power is a huge issue, since there’s no handy outlet in the marina parking lot. This led to a more complex system than I would have otherwise considered:
Naturally, everything must be able to accommodate the dynamics of being on the road, so all the furniture (mostly well-built old steel stuff) is bolted down. Every drawer or cabinet has a locking method, and a pre-flight checklist by the door helps make sure I don’t do something stupid that would result in a parts gumbo on the floor after a few bumpy miles.
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