Simple Hacks to Level up YOUR Workshop. Metal Fabrication Shop Tour.

if you're like me and you're always looking for Shop buildout videos that are going to give you ideas so that you can organize your space and become more efficient then this video is for you this shop is 40 ft wide by 50 ft deep and over the last 14 weeks I have been working like crazy to try to get this done we're like halfway is done with the shop and like the surrounding property but I'm tired of working on this thing and I want to start building trucks in it so today we're going to do a walkthrough because I've been getting asked for weeks to do a walk around of the new shop and then Monday I'm going to start building trucks again anytime I've seen somebody Shop with a loft I've thought it was so cool so when we bought this house and it had this space and it was tall enough I was extremely excited to get started on the Loft not only do I gain square footage with a loft but it also allows me to break this workspace into essentially six different zones and throughout this video I'm going to be giving you the measurements of each Zone 36 ft by 40 8 huge change that I made in this place was lighting so this is what the old lights look like and it's so funny this camera is so good that it really helps adjust what the color of the light is this these lights are too cold they're like they look very blue in my opinion in person and so we added a bunch of lights that are a lot warmer and we need to let the camera readjust come on readjust for me there we go and this these lights really made a huge difference and help giving it a broader Spectrum cuz the old lights were really blue really cold the new lights are really warm and now like it has a very nice bright spectrum of light it's this is definitely the brightest shop that I've been in these high B lights are from a company called hyperlight and i' had never heard of them but one of you actually tagged them in one of my previous videos and then I looked into them and here we are I've got a whole bunch of Hyperlite lights all over the place these high B lights really help clean up the space in comparison to my lash shop where it's just a whole bunch of 4ot Amazon strips tied together and this is like way less lighting like the physical light itself but it appears to put out more light than all of the Amazon strip lights that I had in the last shop some of these smaller compartments of the shop got some of the hyperlight vapor tight lights is what they call them and these really help like they have a lens on them that really helps diffuse the light in those smaller spaces and I was able to surface mount them which was very convenient for my needs I bought the lift on Amazon it's a 12,000 lb capacity and I won't be lifting anything near that my theory was if I buy something at 7,000 and I'm constantly hitting that ceiling how long is the lift going to last I bought something that's rated for 12,000 and I'm going to be constantly putting things that are like 7,000 lb on it and so I'm hoping it'll last a long time however the very first time I use this lift this little chunk of plastic fell out and my Tacoma got stuck on it kidding me this really sucked as you can imagine my first time using a lift so this is something I'm either going to have to heat up and like stretch out and try to form to where I can this like helps guide one of the arms up and down and keep it from like pushing really hard into the steel making it like bind which is what it doing and uh I don't know I'm going to contact the manufacturer maybe I can get one of these but this is just the reality you buy quality stuff usually get quality results sometimes you take a gamble you buy Amazon stuff and you don't get quality results but I love how wide this is It's So Much wider than the lift was in my last shop and the arms have like three stages so like there's just a boatload of flexibility oh I pulled that out apparently I need to make an adjustment but they the arms just get so long which is really nice so it's not all bad I just need to fix this thing and then hopefully I'll start enjoying the lift soon next to the lift I am storing a whole bunch of my steel now this is just like the Whittle down version I'm actually storing the bulk of my steel down in the barn but this is all the stuff that I'm going to be using a lot and I wanted to clean the space up for video next to that I have all my 18vt tools not a lot of explanation needed there it's just a whole bunch of of tools that are on pegboard that came with this shop I painted the pegboard black so it looks a little bit nicer and then hung up all the tools on it and then in the corner next to that is where I plan on doing all of my ring and pinion installs so I have the Press there for now things might shift around in the shop as I use it but right now I put everything that I'm going to need in order to do ring and pinion installs Locker installs that kind of thing right here in this corner this Jaw Box is 14 ft by 6'8 it is humongous when I moved into the new shop when I decided I was moving into a new shop this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally upgrade out of the Milwaukee boxes that I've had for like a decade or so so these Milwaukee boxes got demoted my tools were spilling out of them I've been buying and collecting tools since I was like 16 or 17 and tools that at the time I always thought were quality I bought a lot of Craftsman I wanted stuff that had a lifetime warranty and in those days there was a cool place called Sears where it seemed like you would be able to warranty these tools forever that's obviously not the case but nonetheless I have a ton of tools and I needed a ton of Job Box this thing is already fairly full there's a little bit of wiggle room but I filled it up a lot faster than I thought I would you see that this this Milwaukee box is built much like the uh the Snap-on or not sorry not Snap-on much like the Craftsman or Husky boxes and as you can see the drawer has failed this is the big drawer this is the one that you're going to put all your sockets in if you're watching this video and you're thinking about upgrading to a box of this size definitely shop around save up for something that's going to last more than 5 years if you use your tools every day like I do this drawer is huge and it only has one slide on each side and it's failed I mean when there's weight in here it's even worse but I mean look at all that side to side motion on that drawer so as someone who is in their job box every single day I had to have some thing better so I called my friends at Harbor Freight I told them the issue I had to be honest with you I was not familiar with the product line I've always seen these in the stores and I thought that they looked really nice and now that I've actually put one together I can vouch like the quality difference look at me I'm opening this from the edge of the drawer and this drawer is really heavy comes out nice and smooth two slides per drawer and look at all that weight I have in there I mean I've probably got 70% of my sockets in this one drawer butter this is the kind of toolbox that can last a lifetime instead of lasting like five or 6 years and then you're frustrated and you're searching for another one before we head upstairs let's talk about this jack stand storage little spot so right now I'm basically auditioning different styles of brackets and whatnot this is nice everything's off the floor it's just the these are literally just like go Google jackstand uh Mount and you'll find all kinds of different types I've got like three different types here and I'm currently auditioning which ones I like the most so that I will refine this in the future also downstairs I have a tire machine and tire balancer that I just set up today this is one of those things that when I was thinking what would be in a dream shop tire balancer and tire mounting machine were definitely on that list that's like two for big heavy truck tires like what I use it's like 200 bucks every time I go and pay somebody to uh transfer wheels and tires from one set to another set and that's like every few months at least so over the last 5 years I've already spent enough money that I could own one of these so this to me is a long-term investment this Hardware area is 10' 6 by 116 this wall I took a whole bunch of the bolts and nuts and washers and stuff that I had in just giant tubs that before if I needed an M8 by1 125 that was like 2 in long or so I would have to just dig and dig and dig we spent a lot of hours getting this organized we still need to label everything but at least I know where everything is and now if I come up and I need something that's 5/16 X 18 that's 1 in Long boom I have a whole bin full of those the middle uh the middle bucket is like unorganized uh Hardware this is basically a whole bunch of stuff that was on the shop floor of my last shop when we moved so that this all needs to get organized into the metric bucket and the standard bucket more than likely what's going to happen is as my kids are getting older and they're asking Hey Dad how can I make money and do chores be like hey spend two hours organizing the bolts and it'll give them a chore to do and it'll help me stay organized up here I've got this nut and bolt gauge that I bought on Amazon uh I bought this at a place called Tacoma Screw many many years ago and this is just like a portable way to check nuts bolts and threads so I'll be able to take this down with me and as I'm like working on an engine block and I need a bolt or something I can check what the size is down there and then come up here and get the bolt that I need this other one is just permanently mounted on the wall this used to be like six or seven tubs full of random brackets and tabs and links and all kinds of stuff I have put I've done enough four-link and three link kits now where I only use like 50% or 75% of the kit I did not know that I had this much stuff left over from all of those different kits that I have done so now moving forward it's going to be so much easier to put together a four-link kit or a three-link kit and know what to order from Barnes because I don't have like five bins or seven bins however many it was full of this stuff and it's all organized right up here on the pegboard this is going to increase my efficiency when I'm doing builds substantially and save me money whenever I'm ordering more brackets and tabs in the future this uh is all electrical well there's actually a I've got like a a brake let me make sure that you can actually see me where you're located here oh you're crooked all right this is all 12vt back here this is going to be where I like Bend and trim like small thin sheet metal stuff for like floor pans or whatever uh so this is a work in progress right now I just have the machine up here but back here I have this like 95% organized I've got the drawers really well organized so instead of again I just had so many bins full of stuff at the last shop and now I can come up here and I can grab shrink wrap or I have all of my electrical tools in one drawer or if I'm building a wire harness and I want to use purple green red and black I can just grab that wire all right I need 10 ft Walk It Out Here cut it and I have the wire like ready to go again it was all in bins before just many many spools of it and this is going to drastically increase my efficiency this is the same kind of system that I have on the other side for nuts and bolts and stuff I probably I bought this stuff from Harbor Freight I probably spent like 200 two over $200 for sure on all these like I had to go to multiple Harbor Freights cuz I just kept buying out what they had but this was really fast to put up it's really modular in the fact that if I change my mind where how I want the layout to be on the wall I can just pull them all out and then reorganize wherever I want them it's just it's affordable enough right I don't like that it's plastic in the fact that I don't know how long this is going to last but right now it does hold up more weight this system than I would have expected so it's a relatively low investment for me to get started and then as we use this shop in the coming years I can make a decision on like if I want to continue to use this system or if I want to create something myself I just realized we didn't measure this space 10 or 11' 6 wide by 246 and to be clear I'm going to build railing up here I just haven't gotten there yet the railing is going to be a very important part of this Loft up here I know my kids are already begging to come up here but they're not going to until we get this railing built over the next summer this is what I call the tool room I'm not sure why I honestly there's less Tools in here than there is out there but because I have my rolling Tools in here if you watch the channel you know that I talk about casters constantly I like having tools on casters and so this is just where I decided to store all of these I'm going to be hanging things up on the wall and whatnot too but this is how far I am right now this is also where I decided to put the drill presses so I've got the whole drill press thing this is not organized yet right now I just have a whole bunch of loose drill bits in there I have a boatload of loose hole saws in here and then down here I've got like my magnetic drill press and my tubing notcher or notchers I should say Oh no just not sure I think I got rid of the other one this is just the downstairs and how I decided to organize it this is where my new employee signs in every day we have like actual Punch Cards and then uh this is uh where I want to put I'm still un boxing everything but things that are like I use to measure I want to have this pegboard just be full of tons of different things that are used to measure and weigh and whatnot and then I guess anything else that I just don't know where to put it goes up here too this is the grinding room this is going to have a curtain I'm going to try to find a curtain that's going to fit this uh that will allow me to I'm going to build an axle stand I'm going to build like bring axles in here bring things that I need to grind in here and clean up get right here in the middle put all your PPE on this fan which I keep saying I'm going to mount is not mounted yet this fan is going to go on that wall and it's going to make it to where when I come in here I can hit the fan I already have a switch and an outlet up there and it is going to be constantly moving air out of the shop through all of this dirty air from me like cleaning axles or whatever and then out of that fan this is something that I saw on the like Alex Steel YouTube channel like 3 years ago 4 years ago I saw it that a gr grinding room I was like this is brilliant so whenever we were looking at this as a big blank canvas it was like I knew I had to have a grinding room for sure and then in here we turn the space under the stairs into a uh a place to put the air compressor I bought this air compressor at Tractor Supply it should be enough for our needs here I know it's not a huge air compressor what's funny is some of you guys are going to look at this be like dude that is a giant air compressor and then other people are going to comment that is not enough air compressor for what you do this is the same air compressor I had at the other shop I never had any issues um I'm hoping that it's enough air compressor but I guess we'll find out long term so I don't have a dryer built yet but I will be building some sort of a dryer system for this uh I never used dryer systems in the past I just want to now but on the end of every single run I do have what is what we plumbers call a drip leg so there is a drip leg for like every single one of these uh so moisture and stuff as it makes its way down it has a place to come down and I can just open this oh well oh did you see all that water came out of there that's why you have those so the water will pass by um this guy right here and then it comes out of these valves so every single drop that I have in here let's see if there's water in this one every single drop that I have in here has a drip leg so that we can open it up oh yeah wow I can't believe how much water has come through there already well maybe I'm going to be building some sort of a dryer sooner than I thought but in any case I decided to put all of my spray paint in here and I wish I could take credit for this idea but I got on Google Images I literally typed in the words spray paint storage and just went through Page after page after page and I saw that someone had done something extremely similar to this and so I decided to replicate it this is actually not that inexpensive um PVC pipe's not cheap I think that I I'm in this like it's definitely like 120 140 bucks probably if I was to guess it's like 80 ft of pipe or something like that it's way more than you'd think I cut these at I think 6 in for each one of them um and then I just used a like whole can of PVC glue and uh as you can see I started with a 2x4 down here just to like set an angle and then I just continued to glue every single one to like the three or four that are around it and just built it all the way up I had all of my spray paint stored in a shelving unit before and when everything was straight up and down it takes up a ton of space this is the exact same amount of spray paint and it just seems like it takes up so much less space in here so anyway that's the explanation there I wanted this in here for noise obviously I double insulated every single wall this is left over from uh my office I behind where I have my editing Bay I have a whole bunch of this like egg crate stuff and it worked really good for voice over so the extra stuff that I had I decided to put in here a lot of the sound that comes out of your air compressor actually comes out of the intake and for that reason I decided to experiment this is a bucket that is lined with that same stuff uh that like egg crate sound deadening stuff and I've seen online where a ton of people will like use actual car Mufflers out of the intake to muffle down the sound of their air compressor but I decided to go this route and I'm hoping that between this uh me having this anchored into really soft feet and then having everything double insulated you know it's actually pretty quiet uh however there's one more thing that I want to do this thing resonates it's like a bell I'm going to take some like Dynamat and I'm going to put it on there and uh hopefully that will just be another level of like getting rid of the sound the plan was to show you the barn in this video because the barn is like one of the main reasons that I have the ability to keep this so clean in here because I have a lot of stuff in the barn and I've created a whole bunch of different storage methods in the barn but the Barn's not done and it's dark outside and the barn has no power so I'm not going to show you that in this video if you want to se any any of that stuff just watch the videos I'm going to be constantly shooting in the barn constantly shooting in the shop on all the projects that I have coming up so I hope you enjoyed the video if there's any like if there's any big stuff that I missed like let me know in the comments um or if you have any like cool solutions that I should look into please put links I'm constantly reading through comments trying to find cool solutions to some of these problems that we all have as gear heads so I hope you enjoyed the video I hope to see you on the next one

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 132,249

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Id: EISIJ3ZbBu8

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024