A bit of info might help with advice

Are you upsizing/downsizing, town to country country to town etc

Get a quote from a moving company, it should be free they will be able to advise on what they can move or not. It won't be the first time they have moved a home workshop

I moved from Glos. to Bucks. just over 7 years ago but the memory is still vivid ! Having heard horror stories of removers and even machinery movers dropping lathes, knocking corners off mills, etc., I decided to move the workshop myself beforehand in small loads over a couple months to my daughter's garage close to target. I hired a van and driver so that I had help with the loading/unloading. It's taken me since 1966 to amass the workshop tooling so the last thing I was going to do was to part with any of it. All now safely installed in heated, converted half of the double garage as I don't enjoy the cold, and after all it is about enjoyment.

The rest of the household goods took pot luck with the removers.

It's four years ago now since our last house move from Bedfordshire to South Yorkshire and I used Steve Cox of Landylift to move all my machines (Warco VMC mill, 9×20 lathe, Perfecto motorised shaper on substantial stand and horizontal band saw. He was very helpful, handled the move almost single-handedly and the kit was delivered and placed in the "new" garage/workshop where I wanted them. Can't recommend him highly enough. There was, a while ago, when he wasn't taking new business, I understand, but his advert is still on Home Workshop Ad site, so it might be worth a phone call or email.

I purchased about six large plastic boxes with lids to transport all my subsidiary equipment, tools etc and they went in with the domestic items in the main removal lorry, along with the bench, toolboxes etc.

John

Home Workshop Ads.

If you have a tow bar hire a box trailer, two days is around £80

We moved about 100 miles. It all depends on your involvement with your workshop and the situation at the new house. In my own case whilst I had a fair bit of kit it was only a pastime. I was not involved on any lengthy project. I suppose I never really considered myself a “Proper engineer”, I just enjoyed tinkering as an interesting hobby. The new house we were moving to only had a garage, no shed or workshop. The new place also needed some general DIY work which I was looking forward to doing. Bearing all this in mind I felt that if I took the lathe etc. it would only stand idle in the garage possibly getting rusty for a couple of years. For this reason I decided to sell the lathe and all related kit before moving. 16 months on and I don’t regret the decision, I have been happily engaged pottering around the new place and doing various DIY projects. I have missed not having a bench drill but will probably get one eventually and there have been a couple of occasions when I could have used a lathe but managed to get round the job another way. It depends on how you feel yourself but that’s how it was for me, hope it helps. Best of luck with the move.

Edited By Malc on 08/09/2022 10:30:33

Both my mill and lathe are benchtop machines, and are easily moved by two people.

It's the other stuff that would potentially cause problems.

So, I would bin/donate/lose any bit of stock under 25mm diameter/300mm long as not being worth the effort of packing and moving. The various bits of dismantled wreckage that might come in handy would also go straight in the bin where they should always have been. Parts left over from unstarted/uncompleted projects would join them. I recently found the 3 valves I didn't bend in an engine blow-up 32 years ago; they went in the bin as do any similar parts.

Duplicates of rarely used tools would be moved on to people who could use them. My dad was a woodworker and I'm not, so keeping more than one of each type of plane/etc is already daft. Moving them would be idiotic. I would probably cull all the can't live without one of these tools that I've had for years and never used while I was at it.

The shelves of unlabelled tins full of random junk would be skipped without a second thought.

Doing all of that would mean the new workshop could be laid out for efficient work and storage, and not only would I know what stock I had on hand but I would know where it was. While I've not needed to move my own workshop, I have done it twice for work, and the best thing I can recommend is getting the biggest skip you can dropped inside the building. It's extremely liberating to toss all the accumulated junk that's been getting in the way but no-one is prepared to take responsibility for get rid of. Saves a fortune in storage too.

5 years ago I moved about 80 miles from Redditch, then last year about a further 5 miles to a house more suited to our needs and wants.

I boxed up tools and materials a month or so before the intended move and made sure the movers had seen the volume and type of stuff. This last time there was an unexpected 2-month delay as the chain fragmented and re-formed, so some stuff got unboxed, used and reboxed in the interim.

Probably small beer compared to some – I have a Warco WM250V, a BigDug workbench, a big Record vice, couple of bench grinders and a cheap and noisy 25-year-old B&Q bench drill, plus about 15 big plastic boxes of tools, materials accessories etc.

Moves themselves always went fairly well – 3 strong removal blokes seemed well able to carry the lathe into the new garage and put it down exactly where I wanted it.

I wouldn't do it again lightly, but it wasn't the stuff of nightmares.

That was the business of keeping behind the lawyers, agents and other parties…

I moved to France nearly 18 years ago but as was living in an apartment could not have a workshop here. therefore all my tools went to my father with my old workshop. Around three years ago i bought a house with land and so started to contemplate a workshop, but this has had to go on the back burner and in the short term i am changing my garage into a workshop.

At the end of last year my father deceided he was beyond working with machine tools on larger items and so we dismantled most of the machine tools into more manageable pieces and then dimensioned them so a local carpenter could build purpose built plywood crates with pallet feet and lifting handles.

These came in flat packs and were glued and screwed together as the equipment and tooling was put into them. photos and listings made as each crate was assembled and filled. I ended up with 28 crates of between 25 and 250Kg in weight and was around three cubic meters in volume. These then had to be carried up from the workshop to the driveway garage and fortunately some local weight lifters were able to assist with this.

I found a company in Bristol that were able to come and pick all the crates up with a truck and a couple of heavy lifters. They then did all the export/import paperwork with the photographs and contents lists given to them.

Around a couple of months later the crates arrived at my house on one truck with only a driver and no tail lift or pallet truck, forklift or such. I ended up lifting the crates out of the truck with the driver and had to use ladders as slides from the truck bed to my garage for the big heavy crates which i can assure you is not fun. The crates were thankfully heavily constructed and all corners reinforced with wooden battening glued and screwed together so they survived the abuse intact.

My recomendations for anyone looking to do the same is make the crates of at least 10mm plywood and use battening on all the corners and edges. Screw and bolt down anything heavy inside the crates and fill any loose space with old rags or towels and such. Put as many handles as you can on the crates so they are easily liftable as this will make your life moving them around easier. Log the contents of each crate as it goes in and make a note of its nominal value if exporting. Note the external dimensions of each crate and weigh it when filled and the lid screwd down. Number the crates so you can relate the contents log to each and finally put the current address and shipping address on each crate.

If like me a different company to the one that picked up the crates is delivering them, send them a photograph of the delivery location aspects, so they can see the slope of driveway and gap beteen driveway gates etc. Insist they bring their own forklift or pallet truck and have a taillift as these will make unloading a lot easier. Unfortunately i myself only sent them the photographs of the aspects and thought they would work the rest out for themselves but lesson learnt!

BR Roland

Hi Roger, the contract was delivery inside the garage, but as it was the end of the day I could not be bothered to argue the point and between the driver and me we made it work. I was somewhat stiff the next day though.

Good to know the default for pallets is curb side, as I was not aware of that and I hope it will be of use to others reading this thread.

BR Roland

Not sure where you're moving from/to but these people will hire you a 7.5te truck with crane, they'll even provide a driver, which I reckon would be a good investment, although you can drive a 7.5 te truck on a standard UK licence as long as you're <70.

Doing it this way it's under your control, if it gets dropped it's your fault!