My Blog

What a year 2022 was!

2022 started with my marriage to my wife Sarah. We already had big plans for ourselves going forward but we could never imagine how quickly things were going to progress!

My plan for 2022 was to scale Cymrutec and offer more products and enhance the current designs.
The biggest problem I had was space. Early in the year I sold my apparment and moved in with my wife into her small 2 bedroom terraced home. She had the patience of a saint allowing me to move all my tools and printers into her spare bedroom.
I managed to get everything crammed in and run our small venture from there. But space was always the biggest problem. It meant I couldnt keep high levels of stock, nor could I keep lots of raw materials.
As such it meant I had to do everything on the fly and try to order supplies as the orders came in.

My wife and I talked about the possibility of us buying a new place with a garage which I could use as our workshop. It would allow me to have a lot more space for printers and stock, but it would also allow me to get my hands on some other tools such as a lathe and a mill, so that I could offer not only 3d printed parts but machined parts too!

So we decided to put Sarahs house on the market and we would use the proceeds from the sale of my apartment and the money from the sale of her house to buy our very own place together.

Luckily Sarah being a very keen gardener had kept a garden that shone like a jewel in an otherwise boring district of our city. The house garnered a lot of attention and within days we had offers on her home.

We had already decided that we wanted a new build home as we didnt want to have to do lots of DIY work to get it how we wanted it. We had already visited a site and registered our interested so to have the offers on the house the very same weekend was very fortunate!
We accepted an offer and put down a deposit on the new house.

This was all the way back in April. Our new house was technically built but it was not habbitable. We were told originally that it would by ready by October... but as things go with builders that was grossly over optimistic. There were a myriad of delays, but we did actually manage to move in just before christmas and we spent our first new year in our new home.

That takes us to my workshop!

My workshop is essentially a detached single skin car garage. As such it has no insulation and is prone to getting a bit damp. So there are a couple of things I want to do to it first before I want to commit to having my machines in there potentially rusting away.

So here is the plan:

Step 1: Tanking the walls.
This is where you apply a layer of tanking slurry from the ground to approx 1 meter up. Then rouhly 20cm outwards on the ground.
The tanking slurry will stop water coming in through the bricks at ground level.

Step 2: Batten, insulate and Plasterboard
This is where you take timber and fix it directly the to brickwork. You then insulate between the battens and finally affix plasterboard over the top. This gives a good level of thermal insulation which will help kee the garage warm.

Step 3: Install rubber flooring.
Ive decided to use rubber floor mats for the workshop as they are easily movable and can be configured in many ways. They are also very easy to install and are inexpensive in comparrison to other flooring solutions.

Step 4: Skim, Paint and decorate.
The final steps are to skim the walls with plaster and then when dry paint over the them.
It will likely just be a white paint to keep things nice and light and easier to work. It will also help with insulation a little bit.

Im not going to wait until ive completed all the steps before setting up my tools. The plan is to complete step 1 before moving in the tooling and progress the other steps over the next few weeks and months.
However once it is all complete i'll have a nice cosy workshop where I can spend time designing and working on new products.

2023 I hope is the year thats going to allow me to grow Cymrutec and hopefully collaborate a lot more with other designers and Youtubers.

If you got this far, thanks for reading my story and happy new year!