To cut a long story short, one girlfriend and a job offer later and you could find yourself in Sydney Australia if you aren’t careful.
Yes, I’ve up and moved, leaving all my tools behind in the UK and am starting anew here in the distand lands of Australia, where the spiders can kill you are online ordering is a shambles.
Still, there are a huge number of advantages to this new situation:
Time and a change of perspective
A lot of my posessions, including all my woodworking reference and 3d toolkit are in shipping, somewhere between china and Australia. Not having any of the reference I normally would has let me re-research some aspects and even find better ways to do things than what I had previously planned.
New set of tools
I’ve sold all of my old tools before leaving the UK and will be buying new ones, however this lets me correct a few issues I’d been experiencing;
The Cordless Dremel I had was lovely in that I could take it anywhere I wanted and fit it in stupid locations, however having to charge the damn thing every 45 minutes was a real pain in the ass, and the lithium batterys discharge was not linear, meaning a low charge would produce low power and any kind of torque applied to the bit would stop it from turning.
The Black & Decker Drill was good enough, however the chuck seemed to be a touch on the loose side and lot of slippage would occur if the drill bit were to bite into a piece of material.
The rubber pads on my two clamps were shot to shit. In retrospect, who gives a crap about rubber pads, I’ll just use something like a piece of actual rubber or spare wood section as a pad in future.
Workspace
For the longest time I was concerned I wouldn’t have anywhere to work – the garage being my usual location for such dusty endeavours. Luckily our new residence has a garage which is approximately 10cm large in all dimentions than the one in the UK. Hurrah!
The one downside
The only problem with this move is it makes you realise how not-permanent a lot of things are. I’d never considered leaving the UK before, and always figured anything I create would be easy to transported. There are all sorts of crazy concerns involved if you want to internationally ship a wooden dolls house, or if I’m insane enough, a Viper mk II.
My one worry is that all things come to an end, and if we have to leave Australia for whatever reason, wherever we’re going, am I going to find myself ordering a shipping container to the door, or ditching whatever I’ve come up with?
