whenever I am faced with design decisions, I seem to get a bit of confidence by making a list of options. Have you looked at the various ways you could do this?

You could add enough columns to cover everything, and then just leave them NULL for the cases that won't apply to that piece of equipment.

On the other hand, I'm a little biased toward making one of the (sets of) column(s) into an entity attribute sort of thing, this way you won't be burdened by adding new columns for stuff you haven't thought of or made allowances for, but I've also had experience working with this sort of construct and while its not an ideal fit for relational databases (according to some 🙂 ), it does seem to work!