Truck Seats

A few weeks before we moved from Indy, I found some seats for sale on Craigslist for my pickup. I had been looking for quite a while and then gave up for a few weeks. One night I got home from work and boom the first listing that came up was for some blue seats out of a 94 Z71 in "new condition". I was skeptical about 16 year old pickup seats being in new condition but was pleasantly surprised when they did actually look new.

125.00 later I had them in the back of the truck with all sorts of plans for my interior going through my head. Because 88-94 trucks basically use the same seat they were more or less a bolt in for the truck and a huge improvement over my wore out bench seat. It was just recently that I found out the seats I had bought were very undesirable because the covering on them is actually glued to the foam. This process makes the pleating in the seats look very nice for a long time and also prevents them from ever being recovered. The other minus to them is that it made my truck a two seater.

Today I was driving home from work and part of my drive home is past little garage sale setups along the side of the road. Most of it is normally fruit, leather saddles and harnesses or junk from Mexico. Today a jump seat caught my eye. I had been looking for one to add a third seat back to my truck but they seem to be very desireable and regularly sell for 175-225 dollars on Ebay.

Catching it out of the corner of my eye I made a U-turn and went back to see if it was in fact a jump seat.

When I got out of the truck I noticed a matching grey leather seat sitting a ways off from the jump seat. I asked the guy standing there how much for the jump seat and he told me it was part of a set. I though well if I can get it cheap enough I can just dump the oddball bucket seat. I also thought I should be able to get a good deal on this who would want just one bucket seat. I finally got out of the guy he wanted 300.00 for the set, I told him it was too much for one bucket and a jump seat and he said "no Senior the other bucket is in the back of my truck". He went on to explain that he had taken them out of his 2010 Tahoe because he was putting racks or something in the back. Thats when I realized these were the second row seats not the front. This started to make more sense to me because most front row seats wont fold down completely flat and they normally have the shoulder belts built into the seats making them a pain to put in older vehicles.

I took 200.00 out of my pocket, dangled it in front of his face and he said OK.

Because they are second row seats they have quick release tracks on them. I think I should be able to make rails for them fairly easy. The price was definately right its just going to be a matter of the time involved in making the rails. The fact that they are basically brand new along with the addition of the jump seat will make the effort in getting them installed in the truck more than worth it.

Vice

Over the last few months I have done multiple projects that would have been much easier if I had a bench vice to use. It seems like a stupid thing not to have but the one I had was bolted to the top of the Snap On side box that was stolen during our move.

Wanting another was a no brainer, where I was going to put it was a different issue.

I had been considering an idea for mounting the vice and Saturday I went out to purchase the items I needed. Here they are pictured on my Hoosier couch (pickup seat in the garage).

My plan was to use a hitch mount vice and attach a reciever to the bottom of one of my Lions benches. The reciever I purchased is 18" long, this I can cut in half and place it in two different locations on the bench.

After I removed the ring at the inlet end and cut it in half I had to reinforce the corner of the bench. It obviously was not designed for this and the forces this would apply to the corner would have not allowed the vice to be very solid. I used some of the metal left over from the rivet shelf I mounted over the garage door to make a stiffener that went from the edge of the table to the upper portion of the leg mount which would support the aft end of the reciever.

With the reciever welded to the bottom edge of the table you can see how the vice is posistioned in relationship to the bench.

This design also allows the vice to be moved a ways out from the table which will be nice for holding long pieces of pipe or metal.

The main advantage of ths setup is the vice does not take up valuable space on the end of the bench. If it is in the way of items I want to place on the bench I can simply pull the pin and place the vice on the shelf under the bench. The hitch vice plate was cheap enough (18.00) that I may use this for a bench grinder as well.

Ceiling Storage

A couple of months ago I found a Craigslist add for a clothing warehouse that was going out of business and had shelving for sale. I was not interested in any for myself as I was for shelving for work. The shelves they had listed were industrial type "rivet" shelves and being it was a clothing warehouse they would probably be in very good condition.

After making a call for directions we were talking with a liquidator on what was available. This was a 2 million square foot facility and they had thousands of shelves of all different sizes. We struck a deal and bought 30 six by eight foot shelves for $63.00 ea. They listed new for just over $500.00.

Shelves of this size are far too large for home type storage, but looking at them I came up with an idea to use one hanging from the ceiling in my garage.

I bought a four by six foot shelf from them for $50.00 and cut down the legs. I mounted it above my garage door and have enough material to make another. This one I am using to store the NOS fenders for my Nova instead of the roof of the car.

Mounted in this manner there is still enough room to put a garage door opener on the single door. I had to cut the legs shorter than I thought they would be due to the first panel of the door being kicked up as far as it is.

I am happy with how the project turned out and the cost involved. Units I was looking at that worked in the same manner were over $75.00 for a vinyl covered wire basket shelf.

I was also able to move the Nova and finish up the lighting in the single car stall, the lighting in the garage now is awesome. I have a few more things I want to finish up on in the garage (getting rid of junk), then I'll start looking more serious at either buying or building a rotisserie for the Nova.

Storage 2

Saturday I spent most of the day on my stairwell access door. It was much more work than I had anticipated, mostly due to me wanting it to look good when it was complete and trying to do it as cheap as possible. Cutting the door at around 4.5 feet and remaking the jamb to compensate were just a couple things that added to the time.

Because I did go cheap I had to replace all the hardware on the door hinges with longer screws going into inserts, the original screws were loose and stripped.

The only items I have left to finish up are putting in the threshold, finishing up some of the insulation inside and painting it.

The area inside is smaller than I had envisioned but well worth the effort, it should make a good area to store odd shaped large items like the fenders off the Nova.

Storage

There are things in life that just seem to be a rule, make more money, have less, get a better job, work harder, buy a bigger house, have less room.

For the last one I have an answer.

Our new home is much larger and much less cluttered but our storage areas are much less. Our last house had a walk up ceiling ladder in the garage leading into the attic. It was useful for a lot of my spare parts etc in the garage. If I really wanted to I could carry all the same items upstairs into the access hole in my sons room and try to move them up a ladder into a much more limited attic. For now though I decided to try something different.

The front wall of my garage is common to the pantry and staircase in the house. The pantry occupies the area under the staircase landing and is quite big, but until Tania mentioned it, I never really thought about the rest of the staircase. With ten foot ceilings and another three feet of dead space, the staircase is rather long. So last weekend while I was buying wood for my mini deck, I bought a door and a few other items to go through the wall in the garage and on into the stairwell.

After measuring twice and still cutting in the wrong spot I now have an opening started in the right area. Right now it's slow going because I had no idea how it was laid out inside. It looks like I will be able to put in about a five foot tall door. Its much higher than that inside but due to the way the staircase is built I can only take it up that tall.

The amount of money I spent on the door and supplies makes this some very cheap stoarge and most of the large items I had in the attic of my old house should fit in this area, I may even put in some shelving.

New Deck

Ok its not the kind of deck most people think of but it is a deck.

The side of the driveway drops off into a rainwater wash which didn't allow the the trash cans to sit flat, so I decided to build a smal 3'x5' deck to put them on. Now they dont tip over into the bushes and its much easier to put items in them. Matty had a good time cutting up the boards.

Movers From Hell Pt5

After 80+ hours of my own time, numerous phone calls, 30+ emails and much frustration. I was able to sign an agreement for pretty much every cent I felt we lost through the move.

Now its just a matter of if they lose the check or not.

Dining Room Table

Tania and I finally finished up a project that we both thought would not take nearly as much time as it did.

When we first moved into our home in Indy, 14 years ago we bought our first dining room table from one of those generic oak furnature stores. Within a year most of the finish on it had come off and from that point on we talked many times about sanding it down and refinishing it. In reality putting a table cloth on it was a much easier solution.

The last week of November we decided to go ahead and refinish it. Because of its condition finish stripper wasn't the way to go, so we completely sanded it to the natural wood. After staining it for the first time, it was apparent that 220 wasn't fine enough and had left scratches. We sanded it down with 320 and applied another coat of stain. Once that was done we waited for a clear warm weekend to spray on a clear finish. I didn't thin the finish enough and it came out with valleys in the wood grain. So we sanded it down again, restained it and because of the rain that weekend I decided to brush the finish on it. Again it was too thick and again we sanded it back down, restained it and last weekend I brushed on the first of two very THIN coats.

Saturday I sanded the first coat with some 320 and put on another very THIN coat of clear and for the first time in two months its back in the dining room looking all shiney and new. I don't know if I will ever get all of the sawdust out of the garage, but on the plus side I don't think Tania is any hurry to do the chairs.

Work

I don't ever post much about work, too many issues with doing so. The last few weeks I have been working 70+ hours a week and by the time I get home I eat and pass out. The following picture is one of the reason for being so busy.

I am posting this picture because it is fairly unique. I barely understand how to operate my camera and between the logistics of positioning the aircraft and the time of day I was happy with how the picture turned out. A nice sunny evening in Tucson, with snow on the mountains and an CRJ that is thousands of miles away from where it belongs in northern France.

Old Snap-on

Since I bought my roll away in 89 I have always wanted a top box for it. When I was actually using the box in San Fran it would have been easy to justify buying one but I never did. After the side box was stolen in the move I started looking a bit harder for one.

My roll away is one of the smallest Snap-on makes, the closest one to it today retails for about 1,000.00. Unfortunately its cheaper than the top box which retails for around 1,200.00 and the middle box for around 700.00. So when I seen an add on Craigslist for an "older" Snap-on top and middle box for 250.00 I had to go take a look.

The gentleman that had them for sale was probably in his late 60's and they were buried in the corner of his garage. After looking them over a bit and a small amount of negotiation we loaded them in the back of my truck for 220.00.

The paint isn't perfect on them and there are a few dings, but the drawers work perfectly and he had the original matched keys for the locks.

I started to wonder if there was any collectors value to them being by the appearance of the logos they were "older" boxes so I did some searching on the internet.

There were actually very few sites that even cover old Snap-on boxes. From the small amount of time I spent looking it appears that the collectors value of them is minimal because most mechanics want large boxes and this was as big as it got for their time.

From what I did find these were made sometime between 1950 and 1953 and the same model was made up until the mid 90s. I can't be exact on the date because Snap-on was not consistent at using date codes on everything during this time period. Another reason there probably isn't a huge collectors market.

Regardless I am more than happy with the cost and the functionality of the boxes, now I am finding out just how expensive foam is to shadow the drawers.