The weather was gorgeous and my schedule open, so I devoted yesterday and today to working on improved organization for my garage wood shop. I am working toward wall storage for all the tools, using French cleats for flexible hanging schemes.
Yesterday was frustrating because I started out on a project, then ended up spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to repair my cheapie brad nailer. After completely disassembling the thing and putting it back together, it went from not working at all to working unreliably… which I found to be somewhat inadequate as an improvement.
But I did get a start on a hanger for my jigsaw, which I finished up today:
Then I finished assorted other tasks as well. I made a hanger for a small circular saw:
Then I added cleats so I could hang a dovetail jig:
I have a vise which I hadn’t mounted on anything yet. I decided to mount it on a piece of flat board so I could clamp it to the workbench in whatever position seemed useful for now. And of course added a clear under one edge so I can hang that, too.
Next I tackled trash collection area. I have to allocate a section of the garage to storing trash and recycling, because there is really no other space for it in our common driveway. I wanted it to be contained onto a shelf so it wouldn’t take over too much space, but wanted the option of moving it out of the way for cleaning and rearranging and storing things on the wall behind it. I used sections from an old shelf, a couple scrap pieces of 2×4, and the castors from an old luggage dolly (I like to buy luggage dollies when I see them on sale because they’re usually cheaper than it would be to buy the castors individually). The end result isn’t pretty but it works. I also made a wood lid for the cat litter bucket which holds the daily box scoopings which will be added to the big trash bag when we take out the household trash.
The day wasn’t without further mishaps – most notably the handle broke on my miter saw. For now I have patched it together with tape and zip ties, but I will likely need to figure out if there’s a replacement part I can buy eventually. I also gave up on the nailer and decided I will order another – several others, actually, since this was a combination nailer and stapler and I thought maybe I’d rather have single-use tools for each of those purposes and then I found a set that had three sizes of nailer (from pin to brad) and a stapler. So that’s on its way and I’m sure I will enjoy playing with those.
Tomorrow is supposed to get cold, and stay that way the rest of the week. So I suppose I will shift to indoor projects. And following the national political news with far more anxiety than I like in my life.
Scrappy Blog 