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Shop Layout
I never paid that much attention to shop layout. It was what it was as far as bay location and so on. However, the building we moved to about a year ago has a layout that makes a nice difference. The shop area is almost square with 3 bay doors on the south wall and 2 bay door on the west wall (5 bays, but 2 of them can accommodate a second vehicle when needed, so 7 cars inside is quite doable). Having the cars in the shop at a 90 degree angle to each other, and having the front of the cars all pointing to one central area instead of all in a row makes working in the shop far more efficient.
How is your shop laid out and how well does it work for you?
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2 Replies
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Our shop is small, 2 bays and an office. Looking straight at the building, the 2 bay doors are side by side from left to right, then we have an attached small office. We have a desk and file cabinets in the office (for me), the file cabinets seperate my desk from the customer waiting area. We have an antique stand with coffee, a water cooler, a small magazine rack and 2 chairs for waiting customers. At this time, the set up seems to work ok, although I really could use more space. The 2 bays work for now since we only have 1 tech but if we were to hire another tech, I believe they would trip over each other. It doesn’t seem as if our shop area has enough room for all of the equipment, but there is no option to expand due to limited property space.
If we were to ever move, I have a better idea of what to look for. Also, our bathrooms are located outside (years ago this was a gas station with bathrooms outside), that’s something I would change. And we don’t have an employee area for breaks/lunch. That is also something I would change.
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We built a new shop a few years ago and used ideas that I collected from other shops. We found that a 66×90 building fit best on the property and went with a drive-thru for the vehicles to maximize security. The office and customer lounge view the work area. The shop was sprayed with foam insulation (highly recommend), radiant heat, air supply with dryer and oil & coolant tanks outside structure (very quiet for us and our neighbors)and plumbed inside shop. There are 3 lifts with 3 flat stalls on one side and 1 lift, 1 flat stall and 1 alignment lift on the other side. It works well with the only down side being the 90 degree turn into the stalls. The Tech’s rarely make the turn in one attempt and full-size trucks takes all of us watching the corners. We are going to angle the lifts to improve placement of the vehicle into the work areas. Also, we are considering placing more lifts during the improvement. Future plans call for a quiet diagnostic add-on to the rear side of the shop, a small sound deadened add-on for machine shop/fabrication and an inner structure for parts and shop tool storage.
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