The Shop Itself

I've noticed that I mention my shop a lot in this blog, so I thought I would put up a post about it. The shop itself is recycled- I picked up a badly damaged 12'x24' portable building cheap at an auction a couple of years ago, then had it moved in behind my house. It almost didnt' make it- one of the skids (what it sits on) broke in half under it when the movers picked it up. They ended up charging me a bit extra for all the trouble of gettinng it here and into a tight spot.


Here it is, in all it's glory, before I leveled it. As I found out later, the decorative surround on the roof concealed finger-sized holes in all four corners (left there by the builders!), which let in water, and I had a lot of water damage to repair.

An example of the water damage- lots of rot in the sills (the supports for the walls). The first owner had put a faucet inside it, and a drain- and simply had the drain running out under the building-which was tightly skirted! The floor was in bad shape- the first thing I did was tear out the old floor (with my wife's help).

I build new skids out of scrap material (nailed and glued shorter pieces into 24' long skids), then slid them under and secured them to the joists with screws, using pocket holes for a stronger joint. I tried to get around it, but eventually decided to replace the sill all around with new, pressure treated lumber. Here I've got the wall propped up for this purpose. This was pretty easy- I simply screwed a 2'x board to the wall, jacked the wall up with a couple of small floor jacks, then placed my propping boards (they are bearing on the new skid- if you look closely, you can see that I also put 2'x4' reinforcements above the skid and between the joists- again using pocket holes. This took some time, but is very, very strong).

Instead of nailing into end grain from the outside, which is a weak joint, I drilled four pocket holes in each end of every joist (that's what's going on in the above pic), and attached them to the new sill with four 2 1/2" pocket hole screws. This is orders of magnitude stronger than nailing, plus it leaves no outside holes for water to get in.

To illustrate the holding strength of these screws- one of the end sills was badly bowed along it's length- about three inches out. My wife was helping me- I had attached one end with four screws, and she was holding the bowed board up for me. When I ran the first screw in on the loose end, it pulled the entire 12 foot board straight so fast, that it pulled it right out of her hands!

Here's the new sills- a big improvement! Later, I inserted aluminum flashing (that I got cheap at an auction :) I've still got a lot of the stuff, and it's pretty useful for a variety of things.

So, next I needed to replace the floor with new plywood. This would require 12 sheets of plywood, which could get expensive at retail. As it happened, there was another auction about this time for the items left behind when a church moved into a bigger building. Among these items was a large stage, built of 2x4's and 3/4" plywood. I got it for fifteen dollars, and it took me two trips to get it all home, as I was unable to dissasemble it at the church. Above is my trailer, full of this material.

All of the plywood was covered in carpet, which had been thouroughly glued down. This was a huge pain to get off! The most effective method I found was to stand it on end, attached an old weight bar to the carpet with clamps, then hang the heaviest stuff I could find off it. It took most of a week, but I finally managed to get it all apart. This still left the glue residue, which was easy to deal with- I simply turned the sheets over and used the virgin bottom surface.

The 2x4 material also came in handy- I used quite a bit of it in building the new skids, and more of it in repairing and replacing rotted wall material.

More to come on the shop later!

Preparing an old counter top for making into a workbench

So, today I log onto blogger, and what do they announce? Auto-save! After I already lost this post once to a storm, of course! Anyhow, I'm glad to see it.


So, here we have an old plywood counter top sitting upside down on the sawhorses (with a bunch of the wood I salvaged from that old shop stacked in the background). I'm planning to use the top layer of this, with the laminate still on it for a workbench. My normal procedure here is simply to clip off the nails on the bottom, and file them flat. On this one, however, there's a good possibility that I'll want to be drilling some special-purpose holes in it, and, since I don't want to ruin any good wood drill bits, the nails have to come out.

In the pic above, we see the tools for this job- a good, sturdy hammer, a pair of vise-grips, and a bucket for nails. Note the piece of plywood poking out under the left end- this is another piece of old countertop (with pink laminate, of all things!) that I've already made into a workbench. When I'm done, I'll have three built-in benches in my shop, and one portable, all made from recycled materials, and all sporting vintage vises.

Here's the procedure- grab the pointy end in the vise-grips, and use the hammer to pull it out.

I'm lucky her, in that when it was build, they used finishing nails, so they come out easy. An added advantage of using the vice-grips is that when a nail goes flying into the grass, it's easy to find with the pliers attached to it :).

Older countertops often have a strip of wood glued to the side, and laminate applied over it and the top at once- to remove that strip, it's necessary to cut the laminate where the two meet, to avoid tearing it up. I usually do this with the circular saw set for a 1/16 or so cut, then just knock the side strip off with a hammer. This was a cheaper, and/or less professional installation, and they simply put a strip of laminate on the edges of the stacked plywood. This came off pretty easily with a stiff scraper blade (and a tiny bit of persuasion with the hammer). I tossed the laminate scraps- then dug a couple of them out a couple of days later to use for spreading paint remover on another project (instead of using a brush and discarding it).

The bottom layer is almost never applied very well, since it's just a filler. Usually just some nails and a bit of construction adhesive. Just slam the claws under the edge and start prying- they usually come off pretty easily.

Here are the filler strips turned upside down. Note the globs of adhesive. When I remake the top layer into a workbench, it will get glued to another full layer of plywood, with wood glue, clamps, and screws all around, and will be very stout (and heavy! Oh, my back!).

Also, I removed the nails from the filler strips, and made them into shelves in my shop, so pretty much this whole item is going to get used.