Setting up Your Fabrication Workspace

Transcript

- Hi guys, I'm Nigel from ETS Fab and welcome along to today's webinar. This topic is about workshop space and making your space more efficient and I'll give you a few tips and tricks on how I've set up mine and what I've learned in my career about how to make your workshop more efficient so you can get more done in less time and as we know motorsport fabrication can be pretty time consuming so I want to run you through a few options that you may have or haven't thought about and can employ into your workspace. We'll be running through my home workshop and also the workshop here which will give you a few tips and tricks and hopefully be a help and make your space more efficient. So I've got some images set up here and this is going to be something that's probably a little picture heavy but it'll give you a really good idea on how I've gone about my spaces and what works for me. So without further ado, let's rip into it, we're going to start with my home workshop and look at these images right now.

So a home garage can be anything from a single car garage all the way up to a decent backyard setup like mine. My actual garage measures 6.5 metres wide by 12 metres long, it actually has a roof peak of 3.2 metres and the eaves are 2.7 metres so as you can see it's a pretty large backyard setup and I want to take you inside there today and let's have a roll around and show you how it's working for me and all of the things that we can fit in there. So when we think about a garage we have to understand storage and all of the options that we have in there. Obviously I've got a fair amount of stuff in my garage, it's just accumulated over time but I've made it work and I'm able to get a fair amount of fabrication done in there on both cars and motorcycles. So let's rip into some details and get straight into it to understand what works for me.

So in this image, we have a sheer, so this is a sheet metal cutter and this is actually mounted to a bench that is mobile in my workshop. I've found a mobile bench really handy. This one in question is around a metre by a metre by 900 mm high and it works really well for many things, I've got a vice mounted on top of it and it's just a good home bench that is useful for welding on, it's got a 6 mm thick top that's made out of steel so it's really sturdy and the frame is made out of 50 x 50 mm square tube and it has some castor wheels on the base of it to allow me to roll it around the workshop. Here we have, we'll roll to the next image, here we have, and I'll speak about this mounting point in a little bit once we get to the hoist but my hoist is actually mounted to the floor and I have two positions where I can move it. In the spare position that I don't use regularly I have a floor mounted, I'll just full screen this to make it a little more visible, actually have this floor mounted vice which comes in really handy for doing anything that is difficult or needs a lot of room around it such as modifying a roll cage or doing a large chassis modification or something like that where you'll really need to yank on it.

So this is an offset vice and you'll find an offset vice really handy for doing larger items so you can actually extend whatever you're clamping all the way to the floor and it won't have the issue that a lot of the regular vices have where you're obviously stopped by the actual throat depth of it. So on this, I also have a mount that my tube bender can mount to so I can remove the vice, I can put the tube bender up onto it. This is a tube bender that we gave you the plans for in Motorsport Fabrication course, that's the fundamentals course and it's been a great little device. And an upright tube bender is a really handy tool because you can actually move it around the workshop and store it where you need if you're not using it which is probably 95% of the time. Moving on from that, as you can see the two together.

The benches and the setup that I have in my workshop are all made out of 50 x 50 mm tube and I have some bits and pieces here which I'll show you in a minute. The tops are all MDF so we're running 20 mm thick MDF and I've actually lined a fair amount of my garage in this stuff. What I find it's really handy for is soaking up a lot of the noise that is emitted from welding and grinding. Obviously my house is in a residential area and the last thing you want to do is get shut down at night for having to obviously keep the noise down. So this is a really good way of doing it and by lining everything with MDF you get a really sturdy base and it's a cheap way of doing it.

I'm not sure if it's called MDF in other countries but it's medium, I think it's medium density fibreboard and it's actually made up not like a, it's actually made up of glued together particles so that actually probably is what it's called, particle board But any particle board will actually work really well and maintain a decent flatness so that you can work out and work with a few different options. I'll just try and get my little pointer up here. So here we have, obviously some tubs and what I like to do in my home workshop is keep a number of these under the benches and be able to put specific sized bolts and if I'm working on a project I can dedicate a tub to it. I've actually got one for all the old SR20 bolts that I may ever need so if you use one for say M8 bolts or imperial bolts or M10, M12, it's a really handy way of saving time and understanding where everything is so that you can get to them straight away and save time and again make your workshop more efficient. So we have the toolbox here, so this is a regular roll cab tool box with an upper deck on it.

Toolboxes are great, obviously they need no introduction and are a perfect way to store your tools. One little tip with tools is I usually like to jump in, get my job done, I'll have a whole bunch of tools obviously near my job and then at the end of the day, I'll scoop them all up, put them on the bench next to the toolbox, give them a wipe and put them away at the end of the day. That way when you come back into the garage you can just get straight back into the job and not have to search all around the workshop for them. So that 50 x 50 mm square tube I was talking about actually creates a small mezzanine in my garage so I mentioned before I've got 3.2 metre peaked roofs with 2.7 metre high eaves and my actual mezzanine starts at 2.1 metres tall so I'm just on six foot and this hits about 150 mm above my head so it's a really handy way to kind of get all of those larger items that you're not going to use very often up above you and save that floor space for the critical stuff that you need to work on. Other things, there's a bunch of stuff up on top of there and we'll get to that in a minute.

So what we have, I call it my mess room. And this is the small room that sits in the corner of my workshop and this is actually 3.2 metres deep, so as you're looking into there, 3.2 metres deep. 2.7 metres wide and 2.1 metres high because that's the mezzanine that runs on the top of this. So setting up my garage I really wanted to create a mess room. This is sort of like a motorsport workshop where they have a clean room that actually is used for building engines and keeping any dirt and dust out.

Well this is the opposite, this is really having a clean garage and then having a room that you can create the mess in and not drag it through the whole workshop. So this was an essential part of my garage that I really wanted to set up straight away and with those dimensions it gives me a large enough room to get in there and be able to do most things that I need without having to spray everything in the garage with steel and dust. So the problem with a lot of the dust that comes from the fabrication process is it actually gets moisture on it and once the moisture starts to react with the steel, it'll create rust and it'll actually eat into paintwork and all sorts of things so you really want to keep that stuff away from your prize possessions, being cars or motorbikes or anything else that you're working on so a mess room can really enhance your space. So creating that dust is from tools such as this linisher. So this is a 100 mm wide linisher and a really handy addition into any mess room.

This actually rotates at an extremely high speed and is useful for taking the edges off material, rounding plate and all sorts of things like that so anything that needs a bevel on it, you can just switch this thing on, run the tube around it and it's ready to weld up. It's a really handy addition to any fabrication space. As you can see the MDF bench there has had quite the workout. It's a really good space to be able to get on the grinder and cut through things. You can replace the MDF sheet on top from time to time if you do go too deep but it's a good way of doing things and those grinders are actually hung up on a little aluminium rack that just has a hook on it so to be able to keep your grinders off the dirty table is a huge assistance as well and I actually have two set up here.

So I have one with a poly fan flat wheel and then another with a 1 mm cutoff disc. So this saves me from having to change the discs on the grinder and the buff and I can really just jump in and use either or both in the same process. So usually you'll be cutting one and then grinding something. In the case of tube notching you'll be using the 1 mm cutoff disc to rough out your material and then you'll be using the buffing disc to then finish it off. I've got my welding helmet hanging up there and also my PPE so if you hand your PPE close to the areas that you need it, you'll have less of an urge to go without it and obviously keeping metal out of your eye and keeping your hearing safe for many years to come is an important thing in fabrication.

Most grinders can really damage your hearing so it's important to stay safe with those. For a small amount of time I had a little mill drill set up in the corner of my workshop. This is, I guess an entry into milling, the mill drill aspect as you can see, that actually has what's very much similar to a pedestal drill. It has a handle on the side so you can actually drill things with this and then lock it out and actually mill things left to right in an X Y axis. A handy addition to a workshop, not essential but if you're looking to face say manifolds and other things like that then it is a really good tool.

If you are purchasing something like this, and these do cost around $1200 to $2000, I recommend getting a digital readout on the X Y movement on these, I didn't and I regret it. I think it would be handy just to put a slot in something, say you send the drill through it, put an end mill in there and then shift your table say X 10 mm and then -10 mm which will give you a decent sized slot and something that will come in pretty handy in the workshop. There we've got the apron hanging up and some safety glasses, some drills, a clamping kit and some taps. I like to keep the taps on hand at all times. It's pretty important when you're machining something or you're drilling something and it's got a threaded hole in it that you want to chase that out and that refers to just running the tap back through it so you're not damaging the bolt that runs through it.

This will clean up the threads and get any dirt or grime or grease out of them. I don't actually have a provision to be able to wash parts so it's important to keep them clean through the actual manufacturing process. There as you can see, I've got some drills and specifically just behind, we'll get this little pointer up again. Here you'll see some counter bore tools. So they actually are used for sinking down a cap head or an allen head screw, deep into your material so that it's flush with the surface.

These are really great and they actually range from M6 up to M12 and it's something that's handy for the workshop and then deburring tools are here, they run from 6.3 mm all the way up to 20 mm and they're great for just taking the burr off a hole. You can use a burring tool or something like that that will be extremely handy as well. This is a bit of a dark picture but you can see the 50 x 50 framing that sits on the inside of my mess room and again that's topped with MDF. Under the main bench that holds the vice, again a vice in a room where you're cutting things will be extremely handy. These will save you from holding things with your hands and gaining potential cuts.

Underneath there we have a little three tiered rack and what that is is that's where I keep my materials. This obviously runs about 2.7 metres long and up the top we have aluminium and then in the middle rung we have stainless and then down below we have mild steel. I think this is important to keep these materials separated because the properties that stainless has really enhance or can actually be deteriorated from the contact with mild steel and what I'm talking about there is the resistance to corrosion gets worn away if they're actually touching mild steel so it's really good just to keep them separated, keep them clean. I've got a little door on there so that none of the mess from the grinding process can get in and dirty them up. So this is a view into there.

We've got a couple of welders on trolleys. Keeping these mobile is a great way to wheel them out, make sure that they don't get sprayed with dirt and grime, or you can wheel them in if you want to weld something in there. One thing I will say is that a small area like this really needs a fan or some circulation if you're cutting or grinding larger parts. You don't want to be inhaling too much of that material. So I actually don't have a fan on this one but I try not to do too much heavy grinding without a little breathing apparatus set up.

Here we've got a different type of linisher, this is a slower speed one, so this is actually one that's designed for timber. You'll find these really handy for aluminium. So the problem with aluminium is that when you get it hot, it becomes really sticky and it'll actually load up the grit that's in the abrasive disc so if you run this at a slower RPM, like most timber linishers run at, then you'll actually gain a really good way of being able to linish and flatten off aluminium sections, I also use it for stainless steel. This is great for actually building headers and exhausts, You can actually cut them down and then make sure that they're flat without taking too much material off or actually taking, adding too much heat and impregnating that into that material. So it is a good idea again to not cross contaminate material.

So if you're using one of these, you can see here that you can literally run that red handle. Let me see, you can, this red handle here, you can back this off, pull this off to the side and then fit another one on, and I've got one for stainless and then one for mild steel and one for aluminium. This does take a little bit of time but when it comes to welding, this is well worth it because you're not cross contaminating your materials and you'll get the best weld that you possibly can. To move onto that we've got a pedestal drill in there. This is a really handy item, obviously a normal drill works pretty well, that is a hand held drill but the problem that we have with those is that we can't get exactly 90° holes in larger thicknesses, So using a pedestal drill like this, it's really a good way to clamp things in the vice and then yank on the handle, set the speed via the belt drive system up here.

So this is actually a belt driven drill, opposed to a gear driven drill and there's a few different opinions about belt or gear driven drills. I prefer the belt ones for home use because they do offer a little bit of a slip. So if you're hanging on or you don't have time to clamp down the vice, or you're just drilling some sheet metal, if you're drilling through and it grabs, what it's likely to do with a belt driven drill is just slip on the belt but with a gear driven drill there's no give and it'll actually either break the drill bit or yank that thing around and the last thing you want is your vice helicoptering in front of you. So that is a pedestal drill is an essential part of any little fabrication workshop, they're not expensive and they're a good way to drill straight holes and especially once you start getting into larger drill bits, they become really handy and remember, the larger the drill bit, the slower you want to rotate it so if you're using a 3 mm drill in this then you can set the belt on the faster speed and then if you're using say a 20 mm drill then you can actually bring this right down and rotate it at less than 500 rpm and by using some cutting fluid, you'll be able to rip through that stuff and not damage your drill bits or heat up your parts too much. So next image we have the safety glasses there and the hearing protection which are just quick and easy to slip on.

Again we have our MIG and TIG and those are on some trolleys, one that I've built myself and then one that I've bought. And that sort of concludes the mess room. Something that I affectionately call the mess room. And it's a great little fabrication area and something that I think you'll have a really good time setting up and being able to use. So we have a few other things in the workshop.

So we have a tyre rack and as I mentioned before, the larger the item and the less you use it, it's important to get these up out of the way and I actually created a 12 metre long tyre rack in my workshop, and you'll see that this material here again is 50 x 50 mm or 2" x 2". And it has a wall thickness of 1.6 mm thick and I'll show you a demonstration of that in a second. So this actually carries a whole bunch of tyres and is supported to the roof via some M10 bolts that are mounted up there and then back to the purlins on the wall. And this holds wheels, tyres, motorcycle tyres, bike tyres, just all of the bits and pieces that you're not using very often. Never store tyres out in the sun as they'll degrade very quickly, they don't like UV light so it's important to get them up out of the way and a tyre rack is a really good way to do that.

So we have more tyres on racks and you can see that these uprights here are 50 x 25 and they actually have a thicker wall thickness at 2.5 mm thick because they're carrying a fair amount of weight. Alternatively you can use some pre made racking that is a handy addition. This is a local tyre shop that supplies the tyres for me. They have a bunch of these and again tyres are a pretty bulky thing to store so pre made racking is a good way of getting in, getting that done. Obviously it might not adapt to your space but if you can get the stuff and you can get it cheap.

then it's a handy way of doing it.

So that is tyre racks and they are a great addition to any workshop. Carrying on the rack theme, as you might have seen in my garage, I've actually got three cars stored in a two car space and I have the opportunity to store four cars in a two car space and I'll show you how that happens via this little video. I'll turn the sound down on that. And fast forward it through to the talking, this is the vice that I told you about before. So the parking aspect is one vehicle sits under the car that's on the rack.

And the hoist that I have in my workshop is a Max Jax hoist and this has a limit on its travel up to about 1300 mm so just shy of being able to sit a car underneath it once the hoist is on full extension. So what I'm able to do here is actually fit larger diameter length extensions onto these arms and have it actually extend the vehicle up onto the racks that I've fabricated. I'll show you some images of those once this plays out. You kind of get the idea of how this works but it is connected via a quick connect hydraulic coupler. So each individual hoist arm is operated via a quick connect and what this gives you the opportunity to do is to slim down the actual physical width of the hoist because a lot of hoists are made to suit many different vehicles and these are the extensions that I'm running, so I have three different sizes and to be able to have the opportunity to sit your hoist at the right width to the car that you're working on means that you can put your fittings into the floor and they just sink into the concrete to allow you to set your garage up.

If I had put a normal hoist in here which I could have fit, obviously it wouldn't be a clear span one. If I had have sat one in there then I would only be able to get one car into that two car parking space. So this hoist has been a really good thing and I think it was around $2500 by the time it came from Western Australia and was something that has been a great addition in my workshop and something that will allow you to store cars and also work on cars at the same time so by rolling the car out from underneath you can then work on it and then shifting the hoist over to the next bay, so literally it can swivel 180*, the inner hoist and then I can shift the other one over to the next set of anchors, bolt that down and essentially have two cars stacked and stored while I work on my third car. So let's just speed this up a bit and that's basically how you stack cars. As you can see in this image, the 180 SX is up on those racks and those racks are actually made out of 50 x 50 mm.

So these uprights are 50 x 50 mm and you'll see a constant theme here, I use this stuff a lot. By 2.5 mm wall thickness and these arms that run across are, I think it's 1.5" diameter with a 2.5 mm wall thickness so nice and strong and you'd be surprised at how little movement these have. I would suggest that you brace them if you're in a climate that has maybe some earthquakes or anything like that or you're looking to sort of jump around in the car or do anything up there because they can sway a little but in the way that they're made they are super sturdy and these are the anchor points in the floor. So these actually sink down and I've got some little rubber inserts that stop all the dirt and dust going through those so I can sit the hoist in two different positions and again being able to have four cars in a two car space. So these are the details on bits and pieces and it's made my workshop a pretty good place to work and allows me to store things when I'm obviously not using them.

So that is my home workshop and again if you want any further details on bits and pieces then save them up for the questions and answers at the end. Make sure you send them through and we can have a bit of a bit of a question and answer session on any details that you may need. But in saying that, that's my back garage, it hasn't always been like that. I moved to that location 10 years ago. I started in a one car garage and that's where I built the chassis for the Hilux.

That was difficult because obviously a one car garage doesn't have a whole lot of room and I think that's where I sort of learned to use the space that I've got and we're all going to have different backyards and different garage setups and we're not always going to have the room to be able to do this stuff but it's a super handy way of being able to adapt to your surroundings and get the maximum amount of work done and store everything that you need and also work on it. So as I spoke about before, the 50 x 50 mm tube, if we head to the overall shot, overhead shot sorry. So here we have some little demonstrations on the actual bench construction. So these are two ways to be able to cut and join your tube. So this is my preferred method, this is something that's a little bit faster but if you join tube like this you'll be left with an open end.

As you can see here, so cutting material on a 90° like that will leave you with an open end and that's probably fine if you're butting that up against something. If you're using something like say a corner joint then cutting your material at a 45 like this and then allowing them to sit up together for welding will produce a really neat bench and this is the MDF that I was telling you about, relatively inexpensive, easy to fix to the metal via some self tapping screws and you're good to go. One thing I will show you, back onto the computer is the bike stands. If we have them here. So inside my garage obviously we've got cars over on the left side and then bikes over on the right.

These are the bike stands that actually incorporate these 90° corner cuts and as you can see, they create a nice way to be able to store motorcycles and also work on them at the right height. It also offers some storage underneath which I find extremely handy when it comes time to pull your motorcycle apart. Here's a good one, just a whiteboard that is up on the wall. Really handy just to get your ideas out of your head and get some dimensions down and get your ideas onto some paper. Sorry onto the whiteboard.

Really good for being able to write lists on the bits and pieces that you need or the bits and pieces that you need to do when you come back to the workshop. Again, this is the bike rack and the corner joints that we speak about with the MDF on top and bottom and these caster wheels can actually hold 250 kg independently so you could actually put a car on top of these and it would be super sturdy. So that is the motorcycle aspect of the garage, the tie down hooks that I have one there are just some M10 bungs that are welded on to the tube and then with some tie down points that I had laser cut. And the front wheel chocks, I wasn't certain on the dimensions of the bikes that I was going to run on these so I didn't want to weld them on. So I just folded up some 2.5 mm thick hot rolled mild steel sheet with some solid material to secure the front wheel and allow me to tighten the bikes down onto those tables.

So one thing you will notice, and we go back to our overhead camera is the material here, so this is everything that I've actually made in the benches and the mess room is all out of this 50 x 50 mm galvanised tube so this is actually a coating that is put on the tube and it's actually really difficult to weld so what you'll have to do when you're preparing your material for your storage or your workbenches is actually grind the section away that you're welding back to the bright steel. What this will do, or if you don't do it, what it will do is it'll create a really hazardous white smoke that comes off the material which can be carcinogenic if you inhale too much so you need to stay away from this stuff, set up a fan if you do need to weld it but also buff back the areas and try and get rid of the material. Being only 1.6 mm thick, you don't want to go too far. If you are MIG welding this, then you want to put a nice bevel on that anyway so that your weld doesn't sit too high and then set your welder for that material thickness. You will have a little bit more trouble welding a corner joint like so.

Obviously this weld can be a little bit troublesome because you're obviously welding an open bit of tube and then your joints really have a little bit more gap around them than they do with this 90°, this double 45° cut. So this here is a representation of those motorcycle stands and also the benches that I've got in my workshop. Also the frame on the mess room as I call it and the mezzanine if you call it the mezzanine but the second level that sits on top of that. So it's strong enough to hold some motorbikes up there and the mess room keeps the noise down so the neighbours don't complain and it's just a good place to be. So that concludes the home workshop and again there's so many details in there, I've probably missed a whole heap so write them down and we'll get to them at the end in the question and answers.

But then, so my day to day moves from my home to my workshop which we're streaming from now. And I just want to run you through the setup of this. So I'm renting here at Deakin University and it has some perks, it has a really big open roller door so we're able to get a truck in. So what I actually ended up finding was a big work bench which represents here. So this truck is unloading it.

This actually weighs five tonnes so you could pretty much do anything on top of it, it did come from a defunct automotive workshop and it's a massive bench and we've got it set up in the workshop. So that's been something that has been a huge help to me, it's really good to set up bits and pieces on and you'll see that in our courses all the time. This table was actually made in the 1950s in Melbourne so it's all cast steel and like I said it weighs over five tonnes. It's a real drama to get into the workshop and move around but once it was in position on these adjustable legs we could sit it up level and it's been a great addition to the workshop. Obviously it's cast iron and you can weld on top of it and do all sorts of things.

This is when we were first setting it up, obviously there was nothing else in here. So the actual floor that we have in this workshop is an epoxy floor and I think I have a more detailed photo here. So I got this done before I moved in and this is a really hard and solid floor that you have a real hard time chipping and what it does is it actually seals the concrete in a three part process so they put down, they grind the concrete first and then they put down an epoxy and then they put down an additional clear and then run plastic flakes all over the floor which you can actually choose the colour and this was done by New Look Floors and honestly I'd have trouble living without one of these. When it's all clean it looks amazing and being all speckled like this you really don't see any of the weld burns which actually do burn into the epoxy a little but it's not a huge drama because you can't see them. One thing that is difficult is you have trouble finding bolts if you drop them on the floor but when I moved into this space it was a pre requisite that I really wanted the floor to be bright to allow us to film and get everything sorted in this space and it's been a really sturdy floor and one that will live forever in here.

When we talk about storage in a large space, we're still bringing those elements in that you saw in my home workshop into this workshop and this comes in the form of a mess room. So this is a little bit larger than the one at home and a little bit brighter. This is actually made out of, again 50 x 50 mm tube with a 1.6 mm wall thickness. And this actually is all constructed by myself and the clear, you probably can't see it there because it's so clean but the sheeting on the front of it is clear perspex and this is 5 mm thick, actually acrylic. So you'll see the perspex in here and I think we have a few more images.

Let me find them. So this is actually attached via double sided tape, so these are sheets of 2440 x 1220 5 mm thick acrylic and this is a pretty blurry photo but you can just see it. So the frame surrounding them, 50 x 50 mm on the outside and then 50 x 25 mm, sorry I think this is 20 x 20 mm supports in the centre and I actually run double sided tape on those so putting the acrylic up onto there, stuck to that 20 x 20 mm support and then around the side I actually used some grip tape, so on both sides of the acrylic, used some grip tape which has a really sticky contact patch to actually stick those sheets in. The flipside of that was going to be when I measured all of the angle out that I would need to be able to screw these sheets into this surround. It was absolutely 100s of metres so that was sort of the idea of that was thrown out pretty quickly and I thought you know what, we shouldn't overthink this and this double sided grip tape worked really really well.

So those sheets are all set up in this what I call mess room and it just stops the spray of grinding and working on my work bench in there from entering out into the main work area. So you'll see here I've got a motorbike set up on this table and this was when I first moved in so everything's pristine and clean. It doesn't quite look like that now but it's still not too bad. And again, elements from the home workshop come into my actual workshop and that is the tyre rack which means that I can get things up high and keep them away from the floor and make sure that everything's out of the space that I need for all of the projects that happen in here. So below that the tyre rack, I'll get my little pointer up again, you'll see over here we have two roll cab tool boxes and these sit in front of the tyre machine which I use quite regularly for events.

Obviously setting the car up and getting it ready and then replacing the rubber after. So in this tool box here I have all sorts of nuts and bolts as you'll see in this photo. So again those elements from the home workshop brought in. So all of these plastic tubs sitting inside the toolbox and they're actually broken up into nuts and bolts. So we have M6 bolts, M6 nuts and then it runs from M5, M6, M8, M10, M12 and then anything larger than that can go in the larger bottom drawers.

So back to that image that we had here before, and I'll grab my pointer. I'll have to work out a better way of doing that, this is our first gold webinar so thanks everyone for coming along. This here is compressed air. A huge benefit to any workshop especially when you're fabricating to blow parts out, and we spoke about threads before. It's a benefit to be able to blow those out so if you have a compressor on hand, you'll have to obviously make sure that it's quiet enough if you're working from a residential area that you can run it all the time, cause they do churn through a fair amount of air and if you're running a compressor they can get quite loud.

And then we have a hose here with water. So this is a good little setup and again it's mobile, the tool box rolls around, I fabricated this frame out of 30 x 30 square tube and the just bolts to the grab handles that are on the roll cab. So that all sits underneath the tyre rack and makes everything pretty universal and easy to get to. We'll just jump straight back into that sorry. The tool boxes that are sitting behind me, they're all mounted into a frame that consists of again, 50 x 50 RHS and 25 x 50 lower and upper supports.

And I really needed this because I planned on putting a lot of my fabrication tools inside the tool box. As you can see here, we have the dimple die setup and these are actually very very heavy so by the time this bottom drawer was full of these, we really needed these tool boxes to have a nice support around them and that's why we took off the original wheels that they came with and then made them into a nice long bench that sits behind me and is the backdrop for all of the filming that we're doing. Dimple dies are just one of the things that is in that tool box. There's a bunch of other tools that we go through in our courses that you may have seen. From the outside looking in, this is the roller door with the tool boxes in the background.

We've got the big 5 tonne bench in the centre there and then our mess room that is lined with 5 mm acrylic. We've got an upright drill so this is a geared head version. So for drilling larger items using tapers and drills that reach up to 1.5" in diameter. Really handy tool to be able to again drill those larger items that we need. Then we've got our tyre machine which I showed you previous and I've also got a lathe sitting in there too.

Don't know if we've got an image in this set but we'll have one in the next set. Let's go into that now. So this will feature a lot of the tools I'm running here at the workshop. This is actually a press that I use a heap. It's such a great tool for being able to press bits and pieces in and out such as bearings, bushes, a lot of what we do in motorsport will require a press.

It's really good as well for also proving things like welds and being able to do some destructive testing on bits and pieces to make sure that the strength characteristics are there and it requires a fair amount of pressure to be able to break. Does have a gauge on here so you understand how much tonnage is actually applied and this press has been a great addition to the workshop. One of the projects, this was a worked example that we did in our TIG course, sorry in our fundamentals course was building a TIG table. This mounts the TIG welder, has a hook that allows you to wrap all of the leads up. TIG can actually get a little bit difficult when you've got so many leads, you've got your earth lead, your torch lead, you might have a foot pedal lead like I have here and to be able to keep this mobile you want to wrap those up and get it over to your job ASAP.

So I find a table like this is a really handy addition. Don't skimp on the top sheet, make it as thick as you possibly can because it'll become a nice heat sink for the parts that you're working on. In this application I've used a 6 mm thick top sheet. So this is actually all aluminium and it's great to be able to clamp your parts to and be able to weld them up. We've got a little bottle in there as well, that's an argon bottle that will feed the welder and then the foot pedal on the floor and the seat.

And it's a good place to be and get your parts welded up wherever you are in the workshop. If you are working on a car or a motorcycle and you need to wheel it over, then that's easy as well because it's running on caster wheels. So with a few additions like the filler rods in here, then it just makes it a one stop station where if you need to TIG weld something then you can jump on this bench and know everything's there, it's all ready to go, you don't have to wrestle with the leads and it can make the process a lot quicker. Other factors, or other bits and pieces in the workshop, I spoke about the lathe before. I am a fitter and turner machinist by trade and going without a lathe wasn't an option.

These are brilliant pieces of machinery but you have to weigh by whether you need one or not. Obviously the amount of fabrication I do, I still thought about it for a very long time. And having one of these at home actually required a fair amount of preparation because most of these are powered by three phase power. That's another thing you've really got to think about in your home workshop, what you can power and what you can obviously use. So a lot of second hand welders, if they're older machines, not like our new inverter machines, they might be three phase and that's not offered in a lot of home garages so we need to use 240V as opposed to 415 and most of the welders these days will come with that but they are 15 amp powered so you may have to get an electrician or an adapter set up onto your 10 amp power supply to be able to do that.

Speaking of welders, this is a shot, a closer shot of my SWS 200 amp Alumtig, this is an AC/DC welder. I've got a MIG welder here at the shop and also a TIG welder. And you'll see here the versatility of a TIG, we have stainless steel filler wire at the top, we have aluminium 4043 filler wire there and then we have mild steel in the next two. So these are actually ER70S-6 in 2.4 mm diameter and 1.6 mm diameter. And you'll use those different diameters for larger welds, say if you're welding up some 3 mm plate and you want to move quite quickly along it.

If you were using 1.6 mm filler wire then you might be dabbing and working pretty hard at supplying enough filler rod into that weld. You can then switch to a larger filler rod and be able to service it a lot easier without having to feed it in so fast. And then down the bottom we have titanium so this is something that I've been doing more and more of lately and it's a brilliant material to work with. But most of these filler wires need to have the caps on to make sure that they're not oxidising like the materials that they're welding. And before you start TIG welding then I think it's always important to give these filler wire sections a bit of a clean with some acetone to make sure that they're clean and you're not introducing contaminants into the weld.

This is a bit of an overhead shot of the lathe. This was as I was setting it up. The shot of the geared head drill. So again really good machine and something that's pretty powerful, I've actually got a larger vice on this one. So with the clamp kit I'm able to clamp it right down to the table and hold some 150 mm wide sections.

We have what is essential in most workshops and that's a bench grinder. What I use my bench grinder for is mostly sharpening my tungstens. A bench grinder these days can be something that you don't use too often if you have a linisher because the hard stone on the bench grinder can be difficult to be able to get a nice finish on things but you will find them really useful for sharpening drills, sharpening tungstens and they're not expensive so if you get one with a coarse wheel on one side and a smooth wheel on the other, and you dress them regularly so that they're nice and straight, you apply pressure only to the front facing surface and don't side load them then they'll last a long time and again for a couple of 100 dollars, you'll be able to professionally sharpen your drills and make sure that they're cutting straight and you're saving time by not having to put too much pressure on your drills and wreck your material. Underneath we have a small container of water and that's important if you're just sharpening something and want to give it a bit of a dab with some water to make sure that you can hold onto it still because we cannot wear gloves on a linisher or any operating, sorry rotating device because it'll become pretty problematic if they get caught in there and you want to keep all 10 and that's the aim of the game so don't wear gloves on anything like that. This is a linisher that I've got at work and I've actually got a few different grade abrasion belts for these and again I use separate ones for aluminium, steel and materials like titanium.

So I think we're starting to get to the end of our workshop setup. Just want to have a bit of a chat about your workshop setup and room and like I said, I started in a one car garage and really had to make the most of what I had. You'll find that in motorsport fabrication, that's sort of what we're doing all the time. We want to take the vehicle and get the most out of it in our workshop, we want to take the space that we've got and use it as efficiently as we can. Sometimes doing things a little bit better than we first imagined can actually pay off in the long run and I'm talking about setting the space up initially.

It may take a little bit longer to set up and get right but areas like a mess room, a tyre rack and getting you body parts and bits and pieces up out of the way can actually create a space where you save time and money and you can move around pretty freely. So that pretty much brings us to the end of this. I'll just jump back to my notes here. But a few things to remember, the tyre rack there I had actually 500 mm distance so that the tyres dropped in. These are mostly suited to 17 and 18 inch tyres.

If you're using larger drag tyres then you might want to extend the 500 mm gap between the two sections of steel so that they drop in a little further. But anything smaller than this or anything sorry larger than this will actually cause some dramas when you're trying to pull the tyres out because they'll require too much effort to get out so I like to have that at 500 mm. My motorcycle benches, if you have some motorcycles at home and want to get them up on the bench, a common question is how do I actually get the motorcycles onto them because usually these things are hydraulic operated. Well I just roll mine outside, I've got a motorcycle ramp and I just sit that up, roll the motorcycles onto it, strap them down and then roll them back into the garage. You're not doing that all the time so it's an easy way to save a whole bunch of money there and still be able to have a motorcycle lift.

The car rack, the actually distance between the rack centres there was 350 mm so if you're building one at home, again we are actually going to model these in CAD and do some FEA just to back up my claims that they're safe for use. So it's on you if anything happens but we are going to do some testing just to make sure that these things are sturdy and I would recommend running some additional braces on those. But yeah I think that pretty much sums it up, if you have any questions on workshop space, my layout, the tools that I have here then make sure you get them through to me because we can run through all of your questions and make sure that we've got everything covered. So I'll just refresh my page here and we'll see what we've got rolling in. Again thanks guys for coming along, this is our first gold member's webinar, we've got plenty more to come, we've got plenty more courses coming up and plenty more webinars to get through.

So one of our first questions we've got from Alex, he asks, any advice on tyre machines and what to look for? In particular when mounting low profile tyres? Really good question Alex and it actually took me a little bit of time to understand how to change tyres, having my own tyre machine was really handy because I was having to travel to the tyre shop and get these fitted at a pretty decent expense. $20 per tyre and when you're drifting, you're obviously changing a whole heap. I used to go there with a van load of wheels and tyres and it'd cost me a fair bit and over time I thought, hey maybe I can afford one of these. I've actually got a Corgi tyre machine which is a really quality unit. And some things to look out for with a tyre machine is you just want to make sure that initially the diameter of the wheel and tyre that you're looking to fit actually suits that machine.

If you're working on motorcycles then you'd want it to come with some adaptors that'll suit a motorcycle wheel. Mine goes right up to 24 inches which is super handy for me because I can do the majority of bits and pieces that I've got here in the workshop. Another thing, if you're working on low profile tyres like you requested then you just want the plastic jaw covers that make sure that you don't scratch your nice rims, the problem with low profile tyres is they can get a little bit difficult to mount. So once you've got your tyre machine, and I think the way that they operate is all pretty similar but you just want to make sure that it's got those provisions to protect your rims and then you'll have some fun fitting tyres. When you actually do fit a low profile tyre just make sure that it's nice and lubed up with some soap around the bead and then make sure that the, as you're pushing the tyre onto the rim and you've got it started, make sure that it's dropped down below the actual bead lip on the rim so that it takes the pressure off the machine and it can actually drop down onto the rim and fit your tyres up.

Yeah pretty simple and there's plenty of brands out there, mine's a really good quaity one, something that I won't ever have to buy again ad I don't think there's too many things out there on a tyre machine that they can probably fix. As in make a better product, I think the actual process of fitting a tyre is going to stay pretty relatively the same over the years to come so that's all I've got to say about that. But yeah we've pretty much come to the end of everything, we don't have too many more questions coming in. Hopefully I've covered everything for you today. Remember if you've got any questions then please feel free to ask those on the forums, being a gold member there's a whole bunch of information on those forums, there's other people with a whole bunch of knowledge they're willing to share.

I'm in there daily and it'd be really good to answer your questions in there. So thank you everyone for coming along and I hope you've enjoyed this webinar and I look forward to doing more, thank you.