Dumpster Diving…

It may be hard to believe, but the Mustang is getting semi-close to coming home from the paint shop. This means unless I do something, I’ll end up with two cars in a shop designed for one.

The biggest problem is my work area. Way back when I thought I had a lot of space, I gave myself a big work area that looked like this:

Unfortunately, that big work area is a wee bit too big and without modifications Mystique wouldn’t fit:

The Mustang is even longer than Mystique and has to go in the other, more spacious bay. It was clear that another shop refactor was in order in order to make everything work.

Being the logical car guy I am, the first thing I did was start adding things to the shop in order to make my life more challenging.

There’s a big tool and equipment auction every year in early April. As with every auction, there’s a bunch of junk mixed in with some really good deals. Last year, I got a shop crane for about fifty dollars:

This year, my Brother-in-Law and I went without expecting to get anything. I have a full shop you see and unless there was a heck of a deal I don’t really have the space to add anything.

To no one’s surprise, I came home with stuff to add to the shop.

My first purchase was a five dollar set of very random tools that included two working pneumatic orbital sanders:

The one on the right is an Ingersoll Rand 328a. On eBay, those go for around 70 dollars or so. New versions of the same tool are well over a hundred dollars so for five bucks (and another working sander) I think I did pretty well.

My second purchase was a 12 ton shop press for thirty dollars:

And with that, I thought I was done.

Nope.

About 5 minutes after we arrived at the auction, they started selling a compressor that looked virtually identical to my own. The bidding seemed to die off around 50 dollars (I paid 250 for mine and I got a great deal) so my Brother-in-Law did a sight-unseen bid and won the auction. At the time, I was gob-smacked, thinking he got the deal of the century.

As it turns out, there was a reason the compressor was so inexpensive:

That’s one of the compressor motor’s cylinder walls – or rather what was left of it. While rebuild kits for the motor are available, they’re not cheap and my Brother-in-Law wasn’t keen on throwing that kind of money at a compressor he didn’t really need at this time.

So, what to do with it? Well….I may have mentioned that if he ended up not wanting the compressor that I’d be happy to take it off his hands.

With the cylinder wall broken, he decided to call the compressor an early birthday present and let me have it. Woo!

I now have 128 cubic feet of compressed air at my disposal after I hooked up both of my tanks in tandem. It’s totally overkill, totally unnecessary and a total waste of valuable shop space. I totally love it.

I also tucked away the motor as a spare in case mine ever goes bad. I don’t know if it’s any good, but there’s a decent chance that it is and replacement motors are not available.

So I was done, right? Time for shop refactor 2.0? Oh, not just yet. The shop press that I purchased at the auction didn’t come with the typical plates used with presses. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that I don’t really have anything there to sit on top of the cross bar and press against. I decided to run down to my local metal fabrication vendor and buy a cheap piece of thick scrap metal to use instead.

I came home with a cheap piece of thick scrap metal. Aaaand a couple of other things:

In my defense, these tool boxes were cheap too. In fact, they were free. All I had to do was pull them out of the dumpster where they had been thrown away – after asking permission first of course.

I have a lot of tools, but to this point I don’t really have much in the way of good tool storage. A disturbingly large amount of my tool storage looks like this drawer where I keep my “tools I don’t use very often”:

While these tool boxes were thrown away for a reason (they’re of poor quality and have been beat up) they’re still better than what I had so I threw them in the back of my truck and spent a couple of days fixing them up.

I’m pretty happy with the results:

While these tool boxes don’t really come close to solving my tool storage problem, they make the situation better in many respects.

I now have all of my wrenches in one place:

My pliers and hand cutting tools now live together in a drawer over my big sockets and socket wrenches:

I still have tools that are hard to get to, but these two little tool boxes have allowed me to get my most common tools together in a much easier to access way.

And thus finally, it was time to re-organize the shop so Mystique could find her new home. Sadly, my only real option was to reduce the size of my work area – an idea I really didn’t like:

Basically, I chopped four feet of floor space out of my work area to allocate to Mystique and a small work area behind her. You can see that I’m not done putting things away yet, but the major layout changes are done:

I’m not especially happy with the new layout. Yes, it does allow me to park and work on two cars, but my new work space is darker and much smaller than I’d like. Eventually, I will fix this by replacing all of my randomly-sized, yard-sale cast-off and dumpster-acquired tool storage units with a real tool box with a work area on top. That day though is not today so my current plan is to finish putting things away and get back to work on Mystique. I’d really like to be done with the sheet metal in her rear section before the Mustang comes home.