Difference between revisions of "CleanAndOrderly"

Clean[edit]

Oily dirty fingerprints on buttons, handles, and drawer pulls is the culture of assembly-line crank-turners and junior automobile mechanics who never see the insides of engines. It is not the culture of machinists. If you leave the mill dirty, the next user will want to rout a hanging pocket in the back of his unfinished wooden picture frame, or drill out a broken hinge pin in his headlamp with a fabric strap. He will touch a control, and he will transfer oily dirt with his hand to a place where he can't clean it off. The vibration of the machine will shake your dirt -- containing sand -- quartz grit -- which is harder than tool steel -- down onto his workpiece and into all the sliding fits. The proper culture for a hackerspace which wants generality of use from its machine tools is "laboratory", not "Tire King".

Cardboard boxes used for storage do not get touched with oily, dirty hands, that ruins them. Dirty tools do not get put back in the drawers dirty, they stay out on the table until the end of the work period, then get wiped down and cleaned up all at once. The selection of plastic bags and plastic covers on tools in the cabinet is present to keep the oil on the tools from transferring to everything else in the drawer. The oil is on there because the shop is not air conditioned, which gives it high humidity and possibly condensation, which rusts finely finished surfaces overnight. Wrap tools back up the way you found them, it is functional.

Heavy, oily metal parts with sharp swarf clinging to them do not get placed on painted wooden table tops to scratch and dig into them. Oil and swarf does not get left on those surfaces, to soften the paint and soak into the wood. Appropriate surfaces to put such parts on include plastic laminate table tops, metal or plastic trays, or consumable protective layers like cardboard or plastic bags. All of these options are available in the shop. There are two thickness of nitrile gloves in the lower cabinet. During cleanup, tabletops and trays are sprayed with kitchen surface cleaner and wiped down clean. Plan on a minimum of 30 minutes for cleanup.

Orderly[edit]

You can treat your workshop at home as a last-out-first-in stack, and be successful with that, because you are updating the one brain involved's recordkeeping of location at the same time you are changing a location. That approach doesn't work for the bookshelves at the library. Every item taken off the shelf or a drawer should go back exactly where it came from, in the same orientation with the label outwards. Basically, leave no trace of your use.