Building my garage / workshop (56k death)

[Gas Man]

Yeah I have 2 ext. in the garage, one outside the shed, and like 4 in the house.

[ceo012384]

This weekend I got a bunch done on the workbench, in addition to a bunch of Hooplah with selling and shipping some of the spare R6 parts I'm trying to get rid of.

First things first, I assembled the Ikea kitchen base cabinet and cut drawer liners for all the drawers. This thing is really nice for the money. Really solid drawer slides. There's even a built-in mechanism allowing you to adjust the drawer front alignment up/down and left/right with a screwdriver. Not bad for 100 bucks:



Next, it was time to get to work on the countertop. It's a solid oak kitchen countertop from ikea... what a deal... 2.5" thick solid oak butcherblock, over 2 feet in depth and over 6 feet long for around 120 bucks (I think that's what it was). I took it outside and cut it to length. Then, I used some 220 grit sandpaper to give a light sand to the top and sides. Then I cleaned up all the dust with some tack cloth:



I bought a couple packages of Parks' Super Glaze surface treatment. It's a VERY thick/viscous epoxy. Instead of using polyurethane and having to do 100 coats, I'll just do a few coats of this stuff, it says it's equivalent to 60 coats of poly, I htink I used it a bit thicker than that.

Since wood is so porous I mixed up a small batch and poured it on and spread it on really thin, just to seal up the surface and get it ready:



The next day, I decided where I wanted to put all the stickers and how to orient them and such. I stuck them all on on top of the now-dry skim coat. I didn't have another twfix sticker, so that sucked. My local forum sent me spare white ones with the silver ones I bought, so that got on there. Trip is a cheap bastard so his forum will not be honored for all eternity in my workbench top.

Happy with the setup, I mixed up the rest of the two packages, saving a little bit for later since I will need to sand down edge drips and then recoat the edges. All in all it was about 1 3/4 quarts of the stuff... poured it on and spread it around carefully.

It started to set/cure and I am pretty happy with the result... it's amazingly clear and shiny. I will explain the gap on the right side in a second. Here's the benchtop, I tried to align the fluorescent light with a portion of the benchtop without any stickers when taking photos:







The space on the right is for this bad boy I picked up... full 360 degree swivel both on the base and the throat... anvil on top, 5" jaws on one side, pipe jaws on the otherside. Thing's a beast:




The Parks' Super Glaze is pretty resilient... if you slam a wrench on it or something it will deflect, but over time it will recover. Even still, this is a workbench, so I'm considering picking up another package and adding several more /32"s to the coating. Also, I forgot a couple of the Akrapovic stickers I meant to put on so I could add those too haha.

This bench looks like it will turn out really nice. I ordered a couple swivel leveling feet that will thread into the bottom of the 4x4's for leveling the bench, those will show up before next weekend.

Basically I'm spending as much money on the bench as it would cost to buy the one I was looking at from Sears... except this thing will be a hell of a lot nicer.

[marko138]

Love the bench top. Looks great.

[Mr Lefty]

Looks pimp! you should have taken a pic of your bike and put it in there too...

[Gas Man]

Your craftmenship is GREAT!! And great thinking outside the box.

[Particle Man]

holy cow... beginning to now is an amazing transition

[ceo012384]

Thank you.

Was working on three bikes in there today. It's become quite the useful little shop

[ceo012384]

Mounted the vice to my workbench:



Also finally got around to organizing my tools a bit... here's a few drawers