Building the Ultimate Workbench for my Dream Garage

one of the most important decisions for any size workshop is how you manage your small parts and hardware organization whether you're a hobbyist trying to start a side hustle or running a full-time business your productivity becomes a difference between finishing a project in a few hours or losing an entire weekend trying to find everything you might need for me a lot goes into building cars from scratch and with two new project cars coming into the shop i need to come up with a better solution for getting everything organized let's get into it for this workbench i want to store all of the hardware electrical pins and connectors plumbing and fabrication supplies i've got throughout the pandemic it's been difficult ordering materials so i've been buying a lot in bulk and all of these things need a home i'm also planning for underbench storage for composite materials a wire spool cart something for the chassis table as well as an insane amount of storage bins and organizers so for this project i decided to pick up six of the 26-inch us general harbor freight toolboxes knowing that i wanted to buy a bunch of toolboxes i actually spent a lot of time going to the different stores and seeing how all the different boxes were built before deciding on which one to buy because it was going to be a pretty big commitment knowing that i wanted to buy so many i like that the drawers are extra deep and i like that i have eight drawers to work with my thought is that if i can use these top six drawers and completely fill them with organizer bins the bottom two extra deep ones can be used for any kind of overflow or large supplies or like if i buy a thousand of something maybe 200 of them live in the drawer and then the main box will live down here whenever i run out it's kind of the thought there is a problem though the top three drawers are pretty shallow and finding organizer bins that actually fill the drawer nicely is a bit of a challenge i've got a couple ideas for that but we're gonna get to that later in the episode one of the major design decisions was to have the top of the bench sit at the same height as my mobile workbenches and my welding tables since this bench will be a large stationary object being able to expand to a massive working area for building wiring harnesses or other projects will be really nice to have in the future to set the height and to add strength i'm gonna have to get rid of the casters and build legs and supporting structure for each of the toolboxes taking some measurements of the original casters i had base plates for building the legs laser cut from send cut send so with a high volume project like this one being able to work quickly and efficiently becomes really important none of the individual steps or things that we're making today are terribly complicated but we are doing a lot of them and it can be really time consuming if you don't put some thought into your processes before you start here's a couple tricks that i'm using on this project to be able to work a little bit more efficiently [Music] i'm using three bolts for welding the nuts on each of the leveling feet this lets me assemble and weld them in groups of three instead of one at a time and lets each of them start cooling before i need to assemble the next batch as i weld each one the previous one starts cooling down and then there is going to be less setup time for each assembly getting them ready and getting into the zone [Music] i set a stop on my band saw and square the blade so that each of the legs could be made quickly without having to measure each one this made cutting each of the legs simple and quick [Music] the biggest time saver i came up for the legs was actually 3d printing a tool that lets me tack weld the feet in exactly the same position on each of the base plates [Music] this saves me a ton of time versus having to manually measure and center each foot for the workbench i'm working pretty quickly here to not melt the plastic while i'm tack welding making sure to remove the tool as soon as the foot's tacked into place i wasn't sure if the plastic would survive but so far it seems to be holding up [Music] [Music] so i'm tack welding each of these on the opposite edge instead of on the corner to reduce how much heat is able to get to the plastic i really didn't know if this was gonna work and i was really impressed to find out that it did just fine [Music] here's an example of one of the leg assemblies all together again it's nothing complicated but if you're building a bunch of these it'll save you a bunch of headache down the line if you put some systems in place to work more efficiently these steps save me a ton of time on fabrication before welding the rest of these though i've got a pretty significant shop update to share with you guys for almost eight years now i've been using an eastwood 200 tig welder for everything in the shop it was the first welder i ever bought and it's been a fantastic machine for me to learn on over the years late last year though i started having stability issues where it would work like sometimes but not reliably enough to feel comfortable with it being the only machine in the shop replacement parts were on a six to nine month back order so i decided it was time to add another tig welder to the shop and one i'm incredibly excited to share miller's not a sponsor and investing in the machine meant having to put off the datsun and other personal projects for most of this year i can't help but feel some imposter syndrome since i'm still learning and this machine's meant for daily professional use the 210 dx features a water cooled torch which makes a big difference in welding thicker materials and a wireless foot pedal which is significantly nicer for moving around the shop it's gonna make a major difference for the future projects i'm bringing to the channel and to my growth as a fabricator the miller couldn't have come at a better time the first welds were done with nate on a custom mid-pipe and crossmember for a client's ferrari 599 hgtb i couldn't have been happier with how everything turned out and finishing the ferrari i've never been more excited about the future of the shop and this youtube channel [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] with the ferrari out of the shop the next thing to do was just put my helmet down and get to work [Music] this is my first time measuring out the actual size of this thing and it's going to be absolutely nuts i'm so excited for it i'm using the same ikea butcher block countertops as my mobile workbenches these have held up really well over the years they're pretty reasonably priced and i think they look really nice each of the toolboxes has a lip around the top for setting another toolbox on top so i need to figure something out for setting the countertops flush to the tops of the boxes laying the counter on top of the boxes i marked the perimeter of the flanges and then where each of the boxes met in between so that i can go ahead and follow it up with a router [Music] i hated that i hated that i hated that i hated that i already see the comments now dave dave you you know you could hook a vacuum up yeah yeah i do i know that and i think i would have done that had i had the bits to do so in front of me i think i would have [Music] [Music] [Music] the most important detail of this project is the storage bins that are going to fill each of the drawers i searched extensively online for bins that would fit neatly into the shallow top three drawers of the toolboxes but everything i found was either too shallow or too deep to fit into the one and a half inch deep drawers the easy answer would be to go with one inch deep bins but they wouldn't fit very much and you'd have a difficult time being able to read any kind of labels on each of the bins losing a third of the storage capacity for these drawers felt like a compromise i would regret that's a lot of pins look at the pins there's so many bins [Laughter] what have i done and they're inside of each other there's a lot of bins a few hours with fusion 360 and some not so technical dimensioning and i came up with a custom pair of pliers to run the bins through my table saw this was pretty complicated since the bins have a taper on them and finding a sweet spot to firmly hold the bins without deforming them was a challenge since the bins come in different sizes i sized the pliers for a 3 inch and that way i can do two by three inch bins three by three inch bins and four by three inch bins which will be filling most of the toolbox i 3d printed these using the same ultimaker tough pla used in the prestige experiment so i'm hooking up the saw to the vacuum because i would hate to make a mess in here you know i really hope that this is gonna work because i have a lot of these to cut should probably actually turn the vacuum on [Music] so [Music] i'm actually super impressed with this this turned out awesome it's super clean i just cleaned it up really quick by running my finger around it and nothing sharp everything's really nice super even it cut really nice i'm really happy with that all right let's do the rest [Music] [Music] so in the next episode we've got to finish all the fabrication on this break it all down get it painted clear out the shop the whole place is freaking trashed right now um this whole project really really took up a lot of space but we got to clear out this whole corner of the shop and get the workbench into its final resting location and then start using it start loading it up start testing it i don't really know if this is gonna work out the way that i hope it will but we're gonna find out um so be sure to subscribe leave me a comment let me know if you think this was really dumb or let me know where to get an adapter for a hose to my router because i'm disgusting and desperately need a shower but anyway um leave me a like leave me a comment i hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you guys in the next episode

Channel: Grindhouse Performance

Views: 642,740

Keywords: hardware organization, harbor freight, workbench, tool organization

Id: 0ITR6MJlFu4

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022