Garage upgrade: new concrete pad

Once the building was suspended about 6" over the work site, I built forms with 2x6 lumber, held in place with wood and metal stakes.  I brought in half a yard of 3/4-minus crushed rock, and compacted it with a gas-powered compactor my neighbor just happened to be using the day before I needed it.  I have a hand compactor, which is basically a 15 lb iron plate on the end of a handle, and that would have been a hour-long workout.  Instead it was five minutes of guiding this machine around and I'm sure it did a better job, too.  The main pad is 4" thick, but it goes down to 8"+ around the edges to form a footing.  Yes, that's enough for frost depth around here.  I ran a single piece of #3 rebar around the perimeter, in the lower middle of the footing, to strengthen that portion, but I didn't bother with anything in the center of the pad.  Yeah, it might crack, but it's just a garage floor.  I didn't do any control joints, either.  I'm livin' on the edge!  I did put down a sheet of 6 mil plastic under the central part of the pad, to reduce the amount of water vapor moving up through the slab.

The concrete truck was scheduled for 10:30am.  I finished the rebar at 10, and got the plastic cut and laid down by 10:20.  Phew.

Ready to pour the concrete

The actual pour wasn't too dramatic.  The truck's delivery chute reached nearly to the back of the garage through the main door, so I just had to push the mud around a little with a rake and jiggle the corners.  Pulling a 13' screed board by yourself is a lot of work, but I'd been mentally preparing to scoop a few yards of concrete from the middle to the back of the pad if the chute hadn't been able to reach over my lifting beams.

Finishing it was no fun.  A strong storm forecast to roll in off the Pacific started dumping rain about the time the truck left.  Most of the pour was under the garage's roof, so not a big deal, but I had to run around and put up pieces of plywood to deflect areas that were dripping from the gutters or blowing in under the gap around the edges.  My lifting beams made bull floating the surface a huge pain in the ass.  I couldn't get the handle where I needed it half the time, and wound up digging in a few spots.  I managed to give it a quick once over in one direction and then gave up.

Using the Bull Float

After a couple of hours, I came out and edged the slab, and then hit it with a big steel trowel I bought the night before.  I guess I should have had a "fresno", which is bigger, thinner and has round ends.  I've never used one, but maybe I'll get one next time.  I tried to do a lot of the work hanging from planks laid on the lifting beams, but that was a tough angle to work from, and I was constantly moving the planks around so I wouldn't fall off.  A much better method was the usual way, which is to take a piece of plywood and use it as a work platform.  Thick plywood distributes your load better so you don't dent the surface, and you just clean up the spot where the plywood was previously sitting as you go.  I had a ~3'x2' scrap of 3/4" that worked really well.  I screwed a piece of nylon webbing to it so I'd have a handle to pick it up with as I moved along.  You need a strong handle, because the wet mud really sticks.  From down low, it's much easier to control the angle of the trowel and see any imperfections.  Anyway, my troweling skills are sub-par, but I got it relatively smooth and flat, so whatever.

Smooth Enough

A few days later, I formed and poured a couple of little ramps to get the car from the sidewalk grade to the garage slab.  I mixed up ten bags of concrete by hand and made the pads about 4" thick, with a couple of pieces of rebar in there.  To me, rebar is always a balance between making the concrete shape strong enough to last, but not impossible to break up later if (when) you realize you screwed something up or your wife changed her mind about how things should be.

After a week of keeping the slab damp and letting it cure, I lowered the garage back down, and parked the car inside.  I can't tell you how nice it is to finally have a floor I can SWEEP.

Garage upgrade: lift it up

Step one:  reinforce the framing so it won't fall down on me.  I installed some ceiling joists / collar ties to the rafters to prevent the roof from spreading.  There have historically been a couple of 2x4's nailed across the top plates, but no support for the rafters themselves.  A couple have crept out a few inches, and I might lift the center of the roof and pull them back in with a winch later on.

Then I installed a piece of OSB sheathing at one end of the building, screwing it pretty densely to the framing, to provide shear resistance.  That let me cut a pretty big access hole in the back wall, relieving some weight and making it easier to move materials around.

To do the actual lifting of the building, I sistered some short studs to four sets of opposing studs on the side walls.  Cutting slots in the siding with a plunge saw let me to run 2x6x16' lumber across the width of the building, with 2' sticking out each side.  The 2x6's are then screwed to the side of the primary studs, to keep them from flopping sideways, and prevent the lower part of the walls from spreading.  These beams bear upwards on the bottom of the short studs, which bear up on the top plate and are also lifting the regular studs through the fasteners.

I jacked up one side of the building at a time, using a motley of jacks I have around, from a 20-ton bottle jack that could lift the whole building to a little screw-up scissor jack that's meant for changing a car tire in an emergency.  Those little jacks are weak, and a little tippy, but they start really short and have a wide range, so they're handy, and easy to get at a junk yard.  I put a jack under each of the four beams and lifted a bit at a time until things were where I wanted them.  I then went outside and installed a stack of two concrete cinder blocks, sitting on 2x12 wood pads, to support the building while other work was done.  They're cheap and have good compression strength.  Repeat for the other side, and it's hanging in the air.

The 2x6 lifting beams definitely deflected some, but by keeping the points of support near the walls (either jacking from inside or on the cinder blocks outside) the actual stress on the lumber was not a big deal.  I was able to walk on them and work on the building with very little fear.

The Garage

Our garage is a 12' x 18' shed, built probably in the 1920's.  When we bought our house, it had a dirt floor, no foundation, some serious framing deficiencies, no human-sized entry door, and failing siding on the south and west sides that get all the weather.  A layer of gravel, an access door into the yard, and an automatic opener for the flip-open garage door made it barely usable, and we've been parking our car and storing crap in it for a long time.

I've been talking about doing "something" about it for years, and I'm finally getting to it.  Not that I've been ignoring the situation.  I've drawn up various plans, and made two or three trips down to the city's permit office to explore the possibilities.  Building a new garage is OUT.  After all the setbacks are taken into account, it could only go into a fairly small defined area, near the back corner of the yard, and what am I going to do with the 5' setback area around it?  Pretty tough to make use of those little strips.  Then there's the cost.  Permits, demo and disposal of the old garage, and all new materials for a new garage will probably wind up costing me at least $10k, and that's complicated by the fact that we're in a flood plain area, so I'd wind up paying for an elevation survey and wind up building the lower three or four feet of the structure from all pressure-treated wood or concrete block.  $...$...$...

The one really nice thing about our old garage is that it's totally nonconforming from a zoning perspective.  It's about 2' from the back lot line, and a little less from the side lot line where the driveway is.  Those setbacks are supposed to be 5' and 13' respectively.  The downside is that the only entry ramp onto the property runs right into the garage, so I have to pull trailers, extra cars, etc. up over the curb and into the yard via a gate next to the garage.  That sucks.  Early inquiries with the city into getting a permit for another curb cut and driveway apron were the usual expensive pain in the ass.

The solution:  I'm going to have my own covered bridge.  Well, sort of.  I'm going to install a second garage door on the back wall of the garage, so I can pull through it into the back yard.  The main issue to think about is the shear strength of the structure, once there are two 7'h x 8'w doors cut into it's 12' wide end walls.  The current framing configuration definitely wouldn't survive, and in fact I'm kind of surprised the thing is still as square and plumb as it is, but some proper braced panels, bolted down to a decent concrete foundation should do the trick just fine.

Mobile Base / Storage Cart for Contractor Table Saw

I have a Delta contractor type table saw.  I added a plate to the bottom to catch dust and chips years ago, but now it's time to build a proper cabinet for it.  I got four locking casters from Woodcraft, and a sheet of 3/4" cabinet plywood from Home Depot.  A couple hours with a circular saw and table saw, and I've got a box to set the saw on, with storage and dust collection underneath.

I've been using it for a while now, and I really like the dust collection.  I installed a piece of melamine-faced particleboard directly under the saw.  It slopes down toward the back of the cabinet, where there's a 5" wide cavity for the chips to drop into.  In that cabinet is another piece of melamine-faced hardboard, sloping toward one side, where a piece of 4" ABS plumbing pipe connects to my dust collector hose.  You can see the configuration of these dust-directing ramps in the photo below.  I also packed foam scraps from an old mattress pad up under the cast iron top, to limit air leakage.

View of the unfinished box from the rear, showing the melamine ramps that direct dust
to the port at the lower right side of the cabinet.

The rest of the cabinet is pretty much just a plywood box.  I put locking casters under each corner, and they work fine to hold the saw steady, at least for the way I use it.  They lock the wheel and prevent rotation of the caster assembly with one foot press.  I rarely load up big pieces of sheet goods or timbers on the table saw.  It's more for precision cuts on mid-size workpieces in my shop, so I don't need it to be totally immobilized.

I still need to fit the storage, but here's the saw mounted and usable,
with the old stock steel legs sitting on top.

EZ Deadman for the Workbench

I needed to joint the edges of some long lumber a few years ago, so I tacked together this support from some scraps.  It's been serving me (almost) perfectly ever since.  It's ugly and crappy, but it works well, and I've come to appreciate the flexibility of a standalone appliance instead of a sliding deadman fixed to the bench rails, or some other elegant, dare I say sexy alternative.

It's a scrap of 3/4" plywood, about 12" x 8", with a 2x6 post attached via some long screws through the bottom of the plywood.  I cut the post so the top is just below the edge of my workbench, and I clamp various fixtures to it to support my work.

Home-made Bicycle Work Stand

I'm my own bike mechanic.  Shocking.  Yes, and for years (decades?!) I've been mostly either just leaning the bike against something, or flipping it upside down on the handlebars and seat to work on it.  I've looked at the commercial clamps a few times, but they're just a little too much for me to justify.  I looked at DIY work stands on the web, and saw some ok ones, but mostly they looked kind of kludgy and like more hassle than they are worth.

Well, I bought a new bike last weekend to replace one that was stolen a few months ago.  First order of business is a set of fenders and a rack, but I also took a look at the work stand they were using in the store.  The mechanic was nice enough to let me take a photo of the clamp head, even.  It looked like such a simple, straightforward design...

Efficient Velo Tools bike workstand clamp

So my new bike sat in a corner in the basement all day on Sunday while I put this together.  It works great, and it only cost me about $10.  It's two pieces of oak scrap I had, about 7/8" thick, 1-3/4" x 12".  I clamped a ~1/2" scrap of cedar between them and used a 1-1/8" forstner bit in the drill press to bore a hole down the middle.  That made the two halves of the clamping saddle.  I glued some thin leather to the inside of the clamping part with silicone, to improve the grip and prevent marring on the bike.

A thin piece of cedar between the oak arms makes it easy to form a perfect pair of curved jaws with a Forstner bit

Then I screwed a block to the back of the clamp, to provide a fulcrum point, and tied a small piece of elastic bungee cord into a loop to hold the back together.  The clamping mechanism is just a 3/8" x 4-1/2" carriage bolt installed through the clamp halves 4-1/2" from the saddle end.  I reamed out the hole through one side by rocking the drill back and forth, to provide clearance for the bolt when the clamp halves pivot apart.  I used a 1/2" flat washer to spread the load at the head of the carriage bolt, and a 5/8" dia. spring in between the two clamp halves to move it open when I loosen the nut.  On the outside, I used a long 3/8" coupling nut to tighten the clamp, and got fancy with a turned handwheel made of poplar.  I cut a drilled hole into a hex shape in the handwheel hub with a chisel, and then epoxied it onto the coupling nut.  Having the long nut stick out of the handwheel is really handy, because you can pinch it and spin the assembly quickly into position when there's little force on the clamp, and then use the large diameter of the handwheel to torque it down.  Go easy, don't clamp any aluminum frame parts or anything carbon.  Aluminum seat tubes are cheap to replace, and pretty beefy anyway.

The seatpost is the safest place to clamp

To mount this clamp head, I drilled a couple of small holes and attached one arm to a 12" piece of 3/4" iron pipe with two 1/4" carriage bolts, lock washers, and nuts.  I made a couple of oak saddles for the pipe, by drilling a 1" hole in the middle of a small block of wood, and then cutting that in half.

The pipe is mounted into a 2x4, and fixed with a C-clamp for now.  I drilled a 1-1/8" hole near the top of the 2x4, and then cut a slit about 12" down the center of the board, splitting the hole in half.  The C-clamp at the top squeezes the two halves of the board together and tightens the pipe in the hole.  It's a solid connection, but it allows me to rotate the clamp head to any angle by loosening the clamp.  The 2x4 is also the weakest part of the whole assembly.  With a bike mounted in the clamp, the 2x4 will twist under pressure and allow the bike to wiggle - which is fine, for the most part.  If things are too solid, you could bend the bike, so I'd rather have the weakest section in the stand somewhere.  That said, I do want to improve the support post and clamp to make it easier to use.  Plus I need my C-clamp for other things.  Update:  I used a 3/8" x 5" carriage bolt, some washers, and another coupling nut through a 7/16" hole through the top of the 2x4 to replace the C-clamp.  It's basically the same mechanism that tightens the seatpost clamp.  It works great.  Much more powerful than the C-clamp, because of the finer pitch threads.

Pipe clamp is essentially the same as the seatpost clamp mechanism

In use, I clamp the 2x4 post into the big vise in my work bench, so I don't need a separate stand, but it would be pretty trivial to make one out of either steel pipe (especially if you don't care about the rotation clamp) or wood.  Now, time to install some crap on my bike.

Bike clamp in use

Home-made Hollowing Tool

We're putting up a Christmas Tree for the first time in nearly a decade, and I thought it would be fun to make a couple of turned ornaments on the lathe.  I like the ones that are a globe with a finial beneath and a hanger button at the top made out of contrasting wood.  So I made a practice globe out of a piece of cherry firewood, and realized I really needed to hollow it out to prevent it from cracking, and also to reduce the weight so it would hang on the tree nicely.

I drilled a 1/2" hole down the center and used a small spindle gouge to remove as much material as I could reach.  It kind of worked.  I couldn't get to a lot of material just inside the opening with the end of the straight tool.  So I picked up a 5/16" steel rod stock and some brazing rods at the orange borg a couple of days ago, and made a hollowing tool for under $10.

I bent the last few inches of the rod about 20 degrees in a vise.  Then I got an old 3/16" drill bit ("black oxide" no mention of the alloy used) and ground a flat on both the steel rod and the drill bit so they would mate together.  I wrapped a bit of thin steel wire around the assembly to hold it while I brazed them together, which I did with a common propane torch.  I've never brazed before, but it's pretty much the same as soldering, which I've done plenty of.  I didn't use any flux paste, just the stuff that was on the outside of the rod.

I cut the drill bit off about 1/2" long, shaped the tip into a scraper, and did some general cleanup on the grinder.  Then I turned a quick handle out of a scrap of alder and a 1/2" copper plumbing coupler, and epoxied it all together.  I gave it a very quick test-drive, and it seems to work well enough for my purposes.

Quick-n-dirty Home Made Hollower

Failed Braze Joint

Update:  I put it to the test tonight, and it started working well, but the braze failed and the cutting tip fell off after a few minutes.  I can see that the brazing alloy only stuck to a very small part of the joint, which I think is due to the tiny amount of flux used.  Basically, whatever melted off the rod when I was heating the joint is all there was.  I'll get a can of paste flux and try again.

Brazing is pretty easy (2nd time around)

Update 2:  I picked up a can of Harris Stay-Silv flux at a local welding shop and tried again.  That braze seems to be much more thorough.  I successfully hollowed out the previously unreachable spots on a little globe, although my cutter could use a little tuning on the grinder.  I'm a little torn on this brazed construction method, because I could also buy some carbide tips, drill and tap the end of the rod, and have interchangeable cutters that last forever anyway.  I could also drill a 3/16" hole in the end of the rod, insert my cutter, and fix it in by brazing or with a little set screw.

Hollowed Globe for a Christmas Tree Ornament, ~2" dia.