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Rolling work bench/tool storage

5K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  Cronk 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Right after we moved into this house some friends dropped off a couple of used kitchen counters. A friend of theirs builds and installs cabinets and he always has old pullouts.

My wife wants to use one in the kitchen and suggested I make a rolling work table out of the other... as she handed me a bag of castors she got from Harbor Freight. She's a pretty smart cookie.
All I needed was something to make the top out of.

When we were doing yard work weekend before last I cleaned out the shared easement behind my back yard. There was a couple of old steel clothes line poles that went on the scrap steel pile and a big wooden stand a previous owner had built. I think it was used for flower pots and stuff. Whoever this guy was he loved his heavy lumber... Real 2x's. Didn't measure but I think they're 2x10s. And short 4x4 legs underneath. Heavy stuff. Poifect!
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I knocked the loose bits and the 4x4's off. Nailed a 4x4 to the bottom of each corner and screwed the castors to those.
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... I've got a rope strung across the front overhead door and a tarp thrown over it. "Baby gate" to keep the stupid dogs out of the street.

That hunk o wood is the same width as the cabinet but deeper. I left the bits hanging down on the front and back on it, set the back flush with the cabinet and cut the front. Then cut a board to cover the front. I used some old angle brackets underneath to tie it on.
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I like it. A little tall but just right to set your elbows on it and go "whew!" Yesterday I bent some old rebar into hooks, drilled holes in the boards on one end and put my prybars on the hooks.
 

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#2 · (Edited by Moderator)
While i was replacing the kingpin bearings on the truck, one day I was moving my rolling work bench and one of the 4x4 blocks came loose. Not good. It keeled over and spit all the drawers out and threw down all the tools and parts that were laying on top. Big mess.

I went back over all 4 corners with big screws instead of nails.

Still trying to get the shop organized and all my crap moved around so I can get the fairlane inside but I keep getting distracted. I noticed a couple of the 4x4s were looking a little cockeyed like they were wanting to come loose. ... That thing is really, really heavy. And I've got it loaded down too. Should have gone with full length boards across the bottom instead of just the corners. I've still got some lumber laying around and could do that... but I think my wife has plans for those. And it wouldn't be as much fun..

I decided to brace the existing 4x4s up. Started to go with angle iron... but saving my angle iron for something else and too much potential for knocking myself in the ankle with a bit of angle iron poking out. ... trust me, I could do it.

Dug through the metal pile and found some flat sheets of metal that were useless for anything else, thought I'd drill some holes and nail those to the 4x4s and the bottom sheet of pseudo lumber.

The worst part of working on this thing is the weight. Hurts my back to get down and drill or nail on the thing and it's a PITA to clear it out and flip it on it's end. ... what to do....

Boom!
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so much easier....

Got my sheet steel chopped, drilled and nailed.
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THEN I got distracted by the birdhouse.... My wife's blind Uncle Jerry gave us a birdhouse he built. Yes. He's blind. And he builds birdhouses. They look pretty dang good too!. Except for the paint jobs... they look like a blind man painted them.

Uncle Jerry is a trip. I've heard all kinds of stories about him walking through a packed liquor store, boxes of booze stacked in the aisles, and he weaves right through it all and straight to the shelf of Johnny Walker... Or making finger sandwiches for a party... making a big plate of sandwiches and cutting the crusts off and perfectly quartering them with an electric knife, zip, zip, zip...
I took him Christmas shopping at Best Buy a few years ago. Store was packed. Nothing clears a crowd faster than an old man swinging a white cane, it was awesome. He was shopping for a notebook computer for his wife... who is also blind. (his second blind wife) She's a whiz on a computer. She runs a program that reads all the links on a page to her, or text... a trip. I couldn't understand it it was speaking so fast.
So we're in Best Buy "looking" at computers. Jerry knows squat about them. I was reading specs off to him and he hadn't a clue. But Jerry likes to "look" at stuff. He'll hold out his hands and say "Let me see it". He really gets a kick out of that. The Best Buy kid was just staring at us... I find the one that was on sale that he came for and he says "Let me see it" ... "It's just the display box, they keep them in back"... "Well let me look at the box" So I hand him the box and the kid's jaw drops... and me and Jerry just bust up laughing. Jerry busts up first, I think he can hear a jaw drop from a mile away. And he rubs his hands on the box and says "Yeah I like this one, I'll take it"...

So this apartment complex for birds has been hanging around in the shop waiting for me to do something with it. It was full of old dirt dobber nests so I pulled the bottom off and cleaned it out. Couldn't clean the second floor out, would have had to pull the roof apart and I couldn't put it back as pretty as Uncle Jerry has it. But the top two apartments are bigger than the bottom ones.. so the birds can share some room with the dirt dobber nests.

Then I scrounged the metal bin again and got a really cool coil spring that I have NO idea what it came off of.. an old circular saw blade and a couple of pieces of rectangular tubing from the motorcycle jack I disassembled... (Don't need a motorcycle jack anymore. The hydraulics were missing, don't have a bike, and it was a crappy bike jack anyway.)

Welded the saw blade to the tubing, then the coil spring to the center of the blade, screwed the tubing to the bottom of the house then mounted it on a pole in the yard that had a bird feeder hanging from a cast iron hanger. Saving that hanger for something else... maybe bolt it to a tree so my wife can hang plants off the tree.
I hit the welded metal and the bottom of the apartment complex with some light OD spray paint. Missed the ends of the tubing though.. still motorcycle lift red.
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I used the old mounting screws from the hanger that was there to lock the apartments in place on the pole... so it wouldn't spin in the wind. ... but now that I think about it... I could dig some old kingpin bearings out and put them on top of the pole.... might be fun.

And I forgot to get dowels... the little birdie apartments have no porches... *sigh* whiny birds, I hate being a landlord.

One of the previous owners of the house was fond of burying extension cords in the yard and running them everywhere. Yes... the extension cord coming up the pole is plugged into Christmas lights that are strung through the trees. In June. Pretty much year round, I'm sure. .. had those at the old house too. I love my wife. She makes me smile.
 

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